RSL

Machine-readable content-licensing terms, referenced from robots.txt — say which AI uses are free and which require a license or royalty.

name: RSL
full_name: Really Simple Licensing
layer: licensing
creator: RSL Collective (Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, O'Reilly and others)
status: emerging standard
year: 2025
one_liner: Machine-readable content-licensing terms, referenced from robots.txt — say which AI uses are free and which require a license or royalty.
spec_url: https://rslstandard.org
snippet: robots.txt: License: https://example.com/license.xml → <rsl> ... <permits>search</permits> ... </rsl>
abbreviation: RSL
also_known_as: Really Simple Licensing RSL Standard
canonical_spec_url: https://rslstandard.org
entity_uri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Really_Simple_Licensing
taxonomy_layer: licensing
sub_layer: content-licensing-terms
protocol_type: license
central_problem: Lets publishers attach machine-readable licensing terms to content — declaring which AI uses are free and which require a license or royalty — referenced from robots.txt.
maintainer: RSL Collective (nonprofit; co-founded by Eckart Walther and Doug Leeds)
governance_body: RSL Collective
license: — verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://rslstandard.org
maturity_tag: emerging
current_spec_version: RSL 1.0
spec_date: 2025-12-10
launch_date: 2025-09-10
last_verified: 2026-06-15
transport: robots.txt License: directive → RSL XML license document
core_mechanism: A site references an RSL license document (XML) from robots.txt via a License: directive; the RSL document declares per-use permissions (e.g. search vs. training) and any royalty/licensing requirement, with RSL 1.0 adding dynamic pricing and collective-rights-organization integration.
discovery_endpoint: robots.txt License: directive → RSL XML (e.g. /license.xml)
settlement_type: —
adoption_metric: Launch backed by publishers including Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Quora, O'Reilly Media, and Medium source
notable_adopters: {"value":"Reddit","source":"https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard"} {"value":"Yahoo","source":"https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard"} {"value":"O'Reilly Media","source":"https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard"}
relationships: {"predicate":"enforced_by","target":"web-bot-auth","note":"RSL -enforced_by-> Cloudflare (research §2 seed triple); enforcement in practice depends on verifying which agent is real (Web Bot Auth). Cloudflare is the enforcing operator, not a protocol record id."} {"predicate":"competes_with","target":"pay-per-crawl","note":"RSL and pay-per-crawl both price/gate AI access in the licensing layer (pay-per-crawl is not a separate record in this 12-record pass)."}
ideal_use_case: A publisher who wants to license content to AI — free for some uses, paid for others — in a machine-readable way.
when_to_use: When you must price or gate AI use of your content and want terms that crawlers and licensing intermediaries can read automatically.
when_not_to_use: When you simply want to welcome agents to read your content (Layer-1 discovery) and have no licensing or royalty requirement.
code_example: # robots.txt License: https://example.com/license.xml  <rsl><content url="/"><permits>search</permits><prohibits>train</prohibits></content></rsl>
source: First published 2025-09-10; RSL 1.0 official spec 2025-12-10: https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-1-specification-2025 and https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard . Enforced_by Cloudflare: research §2.
agent_readiness_link: access-economics
layer_legacy: content

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