Reddit is renegotiating its licensing deal with Google as it looks to secure more favorable terms for how its content is used in AI products. According to Bloomberg, the company is in talks to secure a new content-sharing deal that would go beyond its existing agreement, reportedly worth $60 million.

In 2024, Reddit disclosed that licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI, among others, were worth $203 million, Bloomberg reported. Those contracts allowed the companies to legally access Reddit’s vast forum discussions for training AI models and displaying results in products like Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Now, the social platform is pushing for more value from its data and deeper integration into Google’s AI products, including Gemini and AI Overviews.

According to the report, executives said the platform wants a structure that not only licenses data but also encourages users to contribute more to its forums. The idea is that Google search traffic would feed back into Reddit communities, sparking more activity and generating fresh content. That content would then be available for future training of AI models.

In these talks, Reddit has also proposed a “dynamic pricing” model. Instead of being locked into a fixed payout, Reddit wants compensation that increases as its content becomes more essential to AI-generated answers. Executives argue that current licensing terms undervalue how critical Reddit’s data has been for AI companies.

Why Reddit’s data matters to AI companies

AI models like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude rely heavily on user-generated data scraped from the web to generate responses. They depend on content from publishers, news outlets, and Reddit.

Reddit’s forum posts, with their mix of niche discussions, are valuable for training and powering AI tools. The platform’s content has become an important dataset for these companies. Its unique structure of user-driven communities and Q&A-style discussions makes it especially useful for powering AI tools.

These licensing discussions are happening at a time when Reddit’s community is expanding. Daily active users rose 21% to 110.4 million in the past year, while weekly active users reached 416.4 million, up 22% year over year. Growth like this strengthens Reddit’s argument that its user-generated content is significant and central to search and AI outputs.

Companies push back on data scraping

There is growing pressure across the industry to establish legal and financial frameworks for AI training data. Media companies are voicing concerns that AI summaries harm their business models. Google’s AI Overviews, for example, generate direct answers that often cite Reddit threads or news sources without sending users to the original sites. Reports from publishers suggest that traffic drops when AI-generated content appears above links.

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, while Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, has sued Google. They argue that unauthorized use of content undermines referral traffic, which historically fuels advertising revenue.

Some AI firms are experimenting with revenue-sharing to ease the tension. Perplexity AI, for instance, launched a $42.5 million program to share ad revenue tied to publisher content. OpenAI has also signed deals with outlets like Condé Nast, Axel Springer, and the Financial Times to license content directly.

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