Really Simple Licensing spec lets web publishers demand their due from AI scrapers
Summary
The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) specification has reached version 1.0, offering a machine-readable way for publishers to declare how automated crawlers may access and use web content. RSL complements robots.txt and RSS by providing an XML licence-style vocabulary that can be linked from robots.txt, HTTP headers, RSS feeds and HTML elements. It includes mechanisms for declaring permitted AI uses, payment or contribution terms, and protocols to support licensing, crawler authorisation and encrypted delivery.
RSL adds AI-specific permit types such as “ai-all”, “ai-input” and “ai-index” so sites can let search engines index content while forbidding model training or other AI uses. The spec is not an access-control silver bullet — non-compliant bots can still scrape — but it gives publishers a clearer legal and technical framework and is backed by firms offering tollbooth services to bill bots.
Key Points
- RSL 1.0 provides a machine-readable licence vocabulary to state terms for automated content harvesting and usage.
- It is designed to complement the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt) and RSS, and can be referenced via HTTP headers and HTML links.
- New permit categories (“ai-all”, “ai-input”, “ai-index”) let publishers specify precise AI-related permissions.
- The spec supports payment and contribution options for non-commercial organisations and outlines payment/enforcement protocols (OLP, CAP, EMS).
- Industry players including Cloudflare, Akamai, The Associated Press, Stack Overflow and Supertab have endorsed or are testing RSL implementations.
- RSL itself isn’t a technical gatekeeper; enforcement may require network barriers or legal action against bad actors that ignore the spec.
Why should I read this?
Short version: if you run a site that gets pillaged by AI crawlers, this is the new stick (and maybe carrot) you need to know about. RSL gives publishers a readable way to say “you can index, but you can’t train on this” — and a path to ask for money. It’s worth a quick scan if you care about protecting content or understanding where web‑to‑AI economics might head next.
Author style
Punchy. This is a practical development for publishers and infra providers — if you’re affected, the details matter. The article underscores commercial and legal levers that could reshape how content is harvested for AI.
Context and Relevance
Automated scraping by AI organisations has become a major source of training data, often to the detriment of publishers’ traffic and ad revenue. RSL 1.0 arrives amid growing publisher pushback and industry moves to monetise bot access. For platform operators, newsrooms, legal teams and anyone building or operating large language models, RSL may affect data-gathering policies, compliance tooling and potential licensing costs.
RSL’s uptake and the ecosystem of billing and authentication services will determine how effective it becomes. Early endorsements from CDN and infrastructure providers, plus pilots from micropayment vendors like Supertab, mean this could quickly move from a recommendation to an operational requirement for crawlers that want to avoid disputes.