“This was Microsoft's choice, not ours,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told me in an email. “We are and have been open to agreements with companies who are open about their intentions and commit to treat us and our users fairly. If Bing or others want access within our policies, without training, without summarization, and without selling it to others, we are and have always been open to that. If they want to build a business selling Reddit data or using the data for training, we could be open to that, but it’s a commercial conversation.”

Mojeek, the search engine that initially told me that Reddit was blocking all search engines but Google, and which was unable to get in touch with Reddit at the time, told me Reddit got in touch after that story was published. Mojeek said it was unable to share any details about the deal because of an NDA, but confirmed that Reddit wanted to get paid for letting Mojeek crawl the site, even though Mojeek does not have any AI products.

This doesn't add up and it makes me wonder what else Google and reddit agreed upon. This situation benefits no one except Google, as far as I can tell. If reddit wants to milk search engines, and Microsoft is willing and able to pay (which I assume they are), there is no reason for the deal to not go ahead like it did with Google. Kinda makes my brain start going down the conspiracy path, but then again it's hardly unbelievable that Google would pursue anti-competitive business strategies, particularly when it comes to generative AI.