HomeReadTactics desk1,500 publishers adopt RSL standard to price AI crawler access
Tactics·Jul 14, 2026

1,500 publishers adopt RSL standard to price AI crawler access

Tactic · dev.to · stat: RSL 1.0 The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard provides a machine-readable method for publishers to charge AI crawlers for content access. Instead of blocking bots with…

Tactic · dev.to · stat: RSL 1.0

The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard provides a machine-readable method for publishers to charge AI crawlers for content access. Instead of blocking bots with robots.txt, RSL uses an XML format to define usage permissions and pricing. The standard has been adopted by 1,500 publishers, including Reddit and Quora.

The robots.txt era gives way to machine-readable rate cards. Publishers now have a standard for monetizing content for AI training, not just blocking it.

Source

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  1. https://dev.to/fernforge/blocking-ai-crawlers-earns-you-nothing-heres-how-to-price-them-instead-1j6k

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