# Really Simple Licensing (RSL) vs Content Signals Policy

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

[3 Permit](/category/permit/) [Really Simple Licensing](/protocols/rsl/) · [3 Permit](/category/permit/) [Content Signals Policy](/protocols/cloudflare-content-signals-policy/)

|  | [Really Simple Licensing](/protocols/rsl/) RSL | [Content Signals Policy](/protocols/cloudflare-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://rslstandard.org/rsl) | [https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-signals-policy/](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](/protocols/rsl/): 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](/protocols/cloudflare-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](/connect/).

[rsl.json](/data/protocols/rsl.json) · [cloudflare-content-signals-policy.json](/data/protocols/cloudflare-content-signals-policy.json) · [Markdown](/compare/rsl-vs-cloudflare-content-signals-policy/index.md)