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Publishers Launch RSL to Set Webwide Licensing Terms for AI Crawlers

The standard combines site-level licensing tags with a Fastly gatekeeping pilot to push AI companies toward paid, accountable use.

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Overview

  • Really Simple Licensing and the nonprofit RSL Collective debuted with backing from Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, O’Reilly Media, Ziff Davis, People Inc., wikiHow and The Daily Beast.
  • RSL embeds machine-readable licensing terms into robots.txt and related metadata so sites can specify models such as free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference.
  • The Collective is structured to negotiate and collect royalties for participants, echoing groups like ASCAP and MPLC, and membership does not preclude separate one-off licensing deals.
  • RSL by itself does not block bots, and the group is piloting enforcement with Fastly to admit licensed crawlers and deny others, with broader provider support still to come.
  • Major AI vendors have not committed to the protocol, and practical hurdles such as auditing training data use and tracking per‑inference payments remain unresolved given past disregard for robots.txt.