Blocking AI crawlers earns you nothing. Here's how to price them instead

Disallow: GPTBot is a wall. Walls don't pay rent, and the crawlers that matter most either ignore them or route around them. If your content is worth training on, the interesting question isn't "how do I keep the bots out" — it's "what do they owe me, and how do I say so in a way a machine can read."

That's what RSL (Really Simple Licensing) is for. It shipped 1.0 in December 2025 with around 1,500 publishers behind it — Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, O'Reilly, Medium, Vox. This post is a from-scratch walkthrough of what the format actually is, the six places you can put it, the one mistake that makes crawlers silently ignore your terms, and where the declaration stops and enforcement begins. No tooling required to follow along — it's all plain XML and HTTP.

The format is an XML vocabulary, not a config file

An RSL document says: for this content, here's what's permitted, what's prohibited, and what it costs. Minimal example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>