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It's safe to say AI is reinventing the internet. But at the same time, it threatens the foundation upon which it stands: Information.
Chatbots consume and regurgitate information from across the web, but they lack a standardized business model to compensate sources. That means those sources could one day dry up, leaving less information for the always-hungry AI, weakening its output.
Enter the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, a new tech-based licensing solution for the "AI-first internet," as RSL puts it. It's backed by Reddit, Yahoo!, Ziff Davis (PCMag's parent company), People, Medium, WikiHow, Quora, Adweek, and more.
The RSL Standard would allow websites and individual creators to set terms for using their content—from written work to videos, web pages, images, and datasets—before ChatGPT, Claude, Google, or any other AI system surfaces it in chatbot responses. Anyone can sign up for free by joining the RSL Collective, a website where content creators can set their terms and, ideally, see the money flow in.
"Today, there's really no way to say for a website to say, 'Hey, I want Google AI Overviews off [for my content] unless you can compensate me for that lost revenue, which is not unreasonable," says Eckart Walther, co-founder of the RSL Standard and one of the original creators of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which RSL is based on. Doug Leeds, former CEO of IAC Publishing and Ask.com, is the other co-founder.
No AI companies have agreed to honor RSL yet, which Walther and Leeds are working on. But AI companies are "asking for it," Leeds says. They're saying there needs to be a better licensing structure." The more websites and creators that sign up for the RSL Collective, the louder the message is to AI companies that it's the right solution, they say.
OpenAI has crafted its own licensing structure, but it's based on a flat fee rather than paying the content owner every time they use its original work. Reddit, for example, has struck a $60 million AI licensing deal with Google, and another with OpenAI for an undisclosed amount.
Given that context, it's significant that even Reddit backs the RSL Standard. One reason is that the flat fee does not reflect how often AI systems use its content, so it could leave money on the table. Reddit just hopes the deal is the fair value and would need to renegotiate it if not.
"The RSL Standard gives publishers and platforms a clear, scalable way to set licensing terms in the AI era," says Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit. "The RSL Collective offers a path to do it together. Reddit supports both as important steps toward protecting the open web and the communities that make it thrive."
Ziff Davis has not yet struck a licensing deal with OpenAI and is suing the company for ignoring its instructions not to crawl its content until it has one. The company claims OpenAI's web crawlers are ignoring the "robots.txt" file in the backend of its sites, which says they are not allowed to crawl it. Robots.txt has been around "since the old days," Walther says. It's clearly not holding up today.
"Widespread adoption of the RSL Standard will protect the integrity of original work and accelerate a mutually beneficial framework for publishers and AI providers," says Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis.
RSL is designed to work with a similar system from Cloudflare that debuted in July. Leeds' analogy for how they fit together is to imagine Cloudflare as "a bouncer," which says whether you can get in or not. RSL would add another layer where publishers can set their terms of entry. It's like the ID the bouncer checks, making sure the patron, an AI in this case, meets the terms of entry.
"The one thing that really distinguishes us is that we're doing this as a nonprofit," Leeds says. "We come from search, we come from media. We know the problems out there, and they're not how to make some investor billions of dollars. They're how to compensate people who are doing the work, and that's what we're about."