Websites publish robots.txt at their root address to list crawler rules. Well-behaved crawlers read it and follow it, but nothing forces them to. Disputes over whether contract terms can override it are covered in our story on Meta’s commercial terms and AI training.
From 1994 to AI training: a timeline of robots.txt and the fight over web crawling
How a 1994 convention for search crawlers became the front line of AI training consent, from RFC 9309 and GPTBot to pay-per-crawl and publisher disputes.
thelatentdaily.com Editorial Team5 min read