philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

RSL: A New AI Licensing Standard

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Yesterday, a coalition of major publishers (including Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora) announced their support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a new open standard that lets web publishers set machine-readable licensing terms for AI crawlers. ...

RSL builds on the familiar robots.txt protocol, but instead of just saying yes or no to crawlers, publishers can now embed licensing terms directly into their files. Want to charge per crawl? Set a subscription fee? Demand payment every time an AI model references your content in a response? RSL supports all these models.

The technical implementation looks straightforward. Publishers add XML-based licensing terms to their robots.txt files.  ...

Unfortunately, RSL by itself cannot block bots from visiting websites. The standard relies entirely on AI companies voluntarily respecting the licensing terms they encounter. Given that AI model builders have repeatedly been accused of ignoring robots.txt files, expecting them to suddenly honor payment requirements seems optimistic.

The RSL Collective has partnered with Fastly to provide enforcement capabilities. Fastly acts as “the bouncer at the door,” checking whether AI crawlers have agreed to license content before granting access. However, this only works for publishers using Fastly’s content delivery network. Everyone else can ask for payment but has no mechanism to enforce compliance. ...

Cloudflare took a different approach. Since July 2025, the company blocks AI crawlers by default for all new domains. More than one million customers have enabled AI crawler blocking since the feature launched. ...

The RSL Collective’s success hinges entirely on achieving critical mass. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/09/rsl-a-new-ai-licensing-standard/