Reddit, Yahoo, Medium back new licensing system for AI bots
On September 10, 2025, Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, and People Inc. announced support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL)—a new system introduced by the RSL Collective that lets publishers and creators set payment rules for AI bots using their content.
The goal? Make sure AI companies pay up when they use people's work to train their models instead of just grabbing it for free.
What's the difference between RSL and robots.txt?
RSL is like an upgrade to robots.txt (the old "do not crawl" sign for websites), but now with built-in licensing and royalty options.
This means sites can charge AI services either per visit or whenever their words show up in an AI-generated answer.
One system for all publishers
Instead of every publisher making separate deals, RSL gives everyone a shared system that works across all kinds of digital content—not just websites.
By working with Fastly to help block non-compliant bots, the idea is to finally make sure creators get paid as AI keeps growing.
For anyone sharing stuff online or building with AI tools, this could mean more fairness.