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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    access-crawl-control/rsl-licensing-terms-conformance

    RSL licensing terms are discoverable and conformant

    What it checks

    Validates that a site publishing content-licensing terms does so in a form an AI licensing agent can actually find and parse. That means an RSL 1.0 document reachable through at least one of the four spec-defined discovery channels, with a well-formed body whose content scope actually covers the audited pages.

    Why it matters

    RSL 1.0 mandates explicit association — it defines no default or well-known location, so a valid rsl.xml sitting at an unreferenced URL is undiscoverable by specification (s12). Each discovery channel has exact conformance requirements that silently break the chain when violated: robots.txt License: ‘value MUST be an absolute URI’; the HTTP Link header and the HTML <link> both require rel="license" and type="application/rsl+xml". A licensing crawler filtering Link headers on the media type will not follow a link served as text/xml. Falsifiable: given a site with licensing intent, either at least one conformant channel resolves to a parseable RSL document whose <content url> prefix covers the audited URL, or the terms are unreachable.

    Evidence

    • RSL 1.0 Standard Specification — RSL Collective (spec, URL verified 2026-08-20)
    • robots.txt directive License: https://example.com/license.xml — “The value MUST be an absolute URI”; may be global or inside a User-agent group; multiple allowed. HTTP discovery: Link: <https://example.com/license.xml>; rel="license"; type="application/rsl+xml". HTML: <link rel="license" type="application/rsl+xml" href="..."> or inline <script type="application/rsl+xml">. no default/well-known location is mandated. XML: root <rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl" max-age>, <content url required, server, encrypted>, <license>, <permits|prohibits type="usage|user|geo">, <payment type="purchase|subscription|crawl|use|attribution|free">, <amount currency=ISO4217>, <standard>, <copyright type contactEmail contactUrl>, <legal type="warranty|disclaimer|attestation|contact|proof">.
    • Really Simple Licensing (RSL) — home — RSL Collective (spec, URL verified 2026-08-20)
    • RSL 1.0 released; open standard for machine-readable licensing incl. attribution, pay per crawl, pay per inference. Supporters listed: Akamai, Cloudflare, Creative Commons, Fastly, Reddit, O’Reilly Media, Vox Media, Yahoo, Ziff Davis. Discovery via rsl.xml files, robots.txt, HTTP headers, HTML, RSS, media files, plus an Encrypted Media Standard.

    How it scores

    Tier per evidence policy: scored — grade B meets the A/B bar required for scored audits.

    Example failure

    A publisher adopts RSL and adds License: /license.xml to robots.txt. The spec requires an absolute URI, so conformant parsers discard the directive; meanwhile /license.xml is served as text/xml, so the HTTP Link channel’s type="application/rsl+xml" filter also drops it. The licensing terms — including a <payment type="crawl"> rate the publisher wants honoured — are invisible to every RSL-aware agent while looking perfectly correct in a browser.

    Sources