Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard published
A publisher-led open standard launched to express machine-readable licensing terms for AI use of web content, extending robots.txt.
What changed
Really Simple Licensing defines a machine-readable way for a site to state the terms under which its content may be used by AI systems, including free, attribution-required, paid and per-crawl arrangements, expressed alongside robots.txt and in RSS feeds. It was backed by a coalition of large publishers and platforms as a successor to the binary allow-or-block model. Adoption by AI companies is voluntary and, as with robots.txt, it depends on good-faith compliance. Only the month of publication is documented here.
Timing
Rollout began 1 September 2025. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.