In September 2025 a group of publishers and technology companies launched RSL, or Really Simple Licensing, a machine-readable standard for expressing how AI systems may use web content and what they must pay. Modeled on RSS, RSL extends the simple allow-or-block logic of robots.txt into a richer vocabulary of licensing terms, letting a site state, for example, that it permits inclusion in search results but requires payment or attribution for AI training or AI-search use. A nonprofit, the RSL Collective, was created to act as a rights organization on behalf of participating publishers.
The initial launch was backed by companies including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Ziff Davis, O’Reilly Media, and Medium. The standard was developed in collaboration with Creative Commons and included a contribution option intended to support noncommercial publishing. The aim was to give the millions of sites that cannot individually negotiate with AI firms a scalable, automated way to assert and monetize their rights.
RSL is an attempt to fix at the protocol level the problem that bilateral deals like the OpenAI publisher agreements only solved for the largest players. Rather than litigate scraping case by case or rely on robots.txt, which carries no licensing or payment meaning, RSL tries to build an economic layer into the web itself. For business readers, it represents the infrastructure response to the AI-content value dispute: a market mechanism for content rights rather than a courtroom or a one-off contract.