What is the difference between Really Simple Licensing and Content Signals Policy?

The map lists them as complementary: sites and agents commonly implement both. Really Simple Licensing answers: What machine-readable license, price, and authorization terms govern how AI systems and crawlers may access or reuse a publisher's content? Content Signals Policy answers: May content fetched under a robots.txt allow rule also be used for search indexing, as live input to an AI answer, or for AI model training?

When should I use Really Simple Licensing instead of Content Signals Policy?

Choose Really Simple Licensing when your question is “What machine-readable license, price, and authorization terms govern how AI systems and crawlers may access or reuse a publisher's content?” and you accept its maturity: status "Recommendation (RSL's own maturity label, not a W3C/IETF Recommendation) — Document RSL-SPEC-1.0, Category 'Industry Specification'", implementation shipping. Choose Content Signals Policy when your question is “May content fetched under a robots.txt allow rule also be used for search indexing, as live input to an AI answer, or for AI model training?” and you accept its maturity: status "Vendor-published policy convention layered on robots.txt; not submitted to a standards body as of this verification", implementation multi-implementation.

Can Really Simple Licensing and Content Signals Policy be used together?

Yes. Really Simple Licensing and Content Signals Policy are listed as complementary on this map and are commonly deployed together on the same origin or agent.

Really Simple Licensing (RSL) vs Content Signals Policy

The map lists them as complementary: sites and agents commonly implement both.

3 Permit Really Simple Licensing · 3 Permit Content Signals Policy

	Really Simple Licensing RSL	Content Signals Policy
Lifecycle step	3 Permit: What may the agent do here?	3 Permit: What may the agent do here?
Answers	What machine-readable license, price, and authorization terms govern how AI systems and crawlers may access or reuse a publisher's content?	May content fetched under a robots.txt allow rule also be used for search indexing, as live input to an AI answer, or for AI model training?
Governed by	RSL Collective, a vendor consortium; issue tracker at github.com/rslstandard/rsl	Cloudflare, developed with publisher/platform partners named in the announcement (e.g. Condé Nast, News/Media Alliance, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Yahoo)
Status (issuer's words)	Recommendation (RSL's own maturity label, not a W3C/IETF Recommendation) — Document RSL-SPEC-1.0, Category 'Industry Specification'	Vendor-published policy convention layered on robots.txt; not submitted to a standards body as of this verification
Version	RSL 1.0 (2025-12-10)	Announced 2025-09-24 (2025-09-24)
Form / transport	document format	well-known file
Found at	/rsl.xml	/robots.txt
Implementation	shipping	multi-implementation
Evidence	2 verified	5 verified
Primary use case	Control AI crawling and training use	Control AI crawling and training use
Last verified	2026-10-23 (current)	2026-10-23 (current)
Specification	https://rslstandard.org/rsl	https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-signals-policy/

When to use which

Choose Really Simple Licensing when your question is “What machine-readable license, price, and authorization terms govern how AI systems and crawlers may access or reuse a publisher's content?” and you accept its maturity: status "Recommendation (RSL's own maturity label, not a W3C/IETF Recommendation) — Document RSL-SPEC-1.0, Category 'Industry Specification'", implementation shipping.
Choose Content Signals Policy when your question is “May content fetched under a robots.txt allow rule also be used for search indexing, as live input to an AI answer, or for AI model training?” and you accept its maturity: status "Vendor-published policy convention layered on robots.txt; not submitted to a standards body as of this verification", implementation multi-implementation.

Guidance is derived from the two records (question, status, implementation, prerequisites, pairings), not from opinion. Each record's page carries its numbered references.

Read the full articles

Really Simple Licensing: What machine-readable license, price, and authorization terms govern how AI systems and crawlers may access or reuse a publisher's content?
Content Signals Policy: May content fetched under a robots.txt allow rule also be used for search indexing, as live input to an AI answer, or for AI model training?

Ask the MCP server to compare any two: the compare-protocols prompt, or get on both ids. Connect.

rsl.json · cloudflare-content-signals-policy.json · Markdown