Overview

• Really Simple Licensing embeds machine-readable terms in robots.txt and site metadata to tell AI scrapers what they can access and what it costs.
• Supported models include free use, attribution, subscription access, pay-per-crawl fees and pay-per-inference compensation.
• The nonprofit RSL Collective, led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther and former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds, aims to negotiate, collect and distribute royalties like ASCAP.
• Early backers include Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, O’Reilly Media, Ziff Davis, People Inc., wikiHow, Internet Brands and The Daily Beast, with Fastly supporting the standard.
• The spec cannot block noncompliant bots on its own, so enforcement hinges on CDN integrations such as Fastly’s license-token gating, and its success depends on major AI firms adopting the protocol and reporting usage.