Publishers agree a common language for licensing content to AI
Really Simple Licensing 1.0 lets a website state, in a form machines can read, how AI may use its work and on what terms.
Picture made for ABURA Bureau.
On 10 December 2025 the RSL Technical Steering Committee published the official specification for Really Simple Licensing 1.0, a standard for telling AI systems how a website's content may be used. It was developed with publishers and platforms including Yahoo, Ziff Davis and O'Reilly Media.
Robots.txt, the file most websites use to talk to crawlers, can only say yes or no. RSL adds machine-readable licensing terms on top of it: which uses are allowed, and whether payment or credit is required. The first full version lets a site stay in search results while opting out of AI search applications, and lets owners of free content ask AI systems that benefit from it for a contribution.
A standard like this works only when AI developers honour it, or when the companies that deliver websites enforce it. Its value for owners is the vocabulary. Training a model, answering questions and building a search index are different uses, and they can carry different prices. A licence that names each use is easier to price, easier to check and easier to renew than one blanket permission.
