A quarterly, reproducible index of the machine-readable rights signals AI systems actually see — robots.txt AI directives, Content Signals, RSL declarations, and verifiable credentials — across the domains of the world's leading publishers.
Edition: — · Scanned: — · Cohort: — domains · Method open & re-runnable · Methodology
No AI-relevant signal found. Every AI system decides for itself what the silence meant.
An opt-out is on the record — it blocks compliant use, but proves nothing about what the owner would allow.
Machine-readable terms are declared — on the owner's say-so alone. Self-attested, not independently verifiable.
A signed, revocable credential proves exactly what's allowed — checkable years later by anyone, with no account and no permission.
Every domain in the cohort, with the signals we saw. Not in the cohort? Check any site live instead.
What we read: only public, machine-readable signals — /robots.txt (AI user-agents such as
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot; Content-Signals; RSL
License: discovery and the referenced license.xml), response headers
(X-Robots-Tag: noai), and homepage <head> license/credential links.
Where a signal points to a verifiable credential, we resolve and verify it — signature via did:web,
revocation via status list — using the open-source
content-license-verify reference verifier.
The scanner itself is open source and dependency-free: a present-but-failing credential is recorded,
never promoted, and a domain we couldn't check is recorded as uncertain, never as silent.
What we don't do: nothing behind logins or paywalls, no article content (metadata only), no natural-language ToS interpretation, no ranking of named "offenders." Aggregates are what we publish; individual results go to the domain owner.
Respect: identified user-agent, metadata-only fetches, rate-limited. Every cohort domain is notified with its result and evidence before publication and can fix and re-scan — fixes before publication count as fixed.
Reproduce it: the scanner, tier rules, crawler list, cohort, and scan date are published. Run the same check on your own domain at licensefoundry.com/#rights-tool.
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