RSL 1.0 makes AI content licensing an official standard

The RSL Collective announced the standard in September with support from Yahoo, Ziff Davis and O’Reilly Media. RSL extends the role of robots.txt, which tells crawlers what parts of a website they may access. The standard itself cannot stop scrapers that ignore its terms, but infrastructure providers backing it can block them. Those providers now include Cloudflare and Akamai, alongside Fastly.

RSL 1.0 allows publishers to bar their material from AI-powered search tools such as Google’s AI Mode while remaining in traditional search. Google currently offers no individual opt-out from its AI features that does not also remove a site from traditional search.

“RSL provides exactly that missing layer,” RSL Collective cofounders Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther said in an emailed statement to The Verge. They said publishers could use the standard to remain available in regular search while opting out of AI training, grounding or generative answers.

The Collective says more than 1,500 media organizations and brands support RSL. Endorsers include Reddit, Quora, WikiHow, Stack Overflow and Medium, as well as The Associated Press, Vox Media, The Guardian, Slate, BuzzFeed and Arena Group, publisher of Men’s Journal. Leeds said the release and broad backing make RSL an expected way to communicate how content may be used in AI systems, with weight in practice and legal interpretation.

Google is under investigation by the European Commission over whether it violated antitrust policies by using publishers’ content in AI search features without allowing them to refuse that use. The RSL Collective also worked with Creative Commons to introduce a “contribution” payment option for nonprofits and individuals whose webpages, code repositories and datasets form part of the internet’s shared pool of knowledge and creative work.