Integrating Choices in Open Standards: CC Signals and the RSL Standard - Creative Commons

"That brings us to Real Simple Licensing (RSL). Publicly launched in September 2025, today the RSL Collective releases the RSL 1.0 standard. RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation. This is an example of emerging technical systems used by websites to automate compensation for when their digital content—such as text, images, and structured data—is accessed by machines. We’ve been referring to these systems as pay-to-crawl. Think of it as the web’s attempt to answer the question: what tools are needed when bots become the biggest readers? If you are new to the concept, we recently published an issue brief that breaks it down in plain language.

On the surface, Creative Commons and pay-to-crawl systems are strange bedfellows. We have always been a champion of the open web and are concerned about a world where knowledge is harder to access. But we also recognize that responsible, interoperable systems can create leverage where none previously existed. Thoughtfully designed, pay-to-crawl systems may help curb extractive behavior by powerful actors while keeping the web open for everyone else."