Licensing, payment, and Altdown
Altdown says what a page's content is and how its publisher would like it used. It does not license content, enforce access, or charge for it. Other standards do those jobs, and Altdown is designed to work alongside them.
This page is guidance, not part of the specification. It describes these standards as of November 2026 and will change as they do.
How they fit together
| Standard | What it does | With Altdown |
|---|---|---|
| RSL (Really Simple Licensing) | Machine-readable license terms: permitted uses, attribution, and prices for crawling or AI use. A License: line in robots.txt points to the license. Version 1.0 was released in December 2025. |
Signals state a preference. An RSL license states the terms. Make sure the license covers the copies' URLs. |
| TDMRep | Reserves text and data mining rights under EU law and points to a policy, per URL, through an HTTP header, a /.well-known/tdmrep.json file, or an HTML meta tag. A W3C Community Group report. |
Apply the reservation to the copies too, and keep ai-train consistent with it. |
| IAB Tech Lab CoMP | A flow for AI systems to agree on terms with a publisher before crawling, then request access and receive a token. Version 1.0 was published for comment in March 2026. | It enforces access at the CDN or server. Gate the copies the same way as the pages. |
| HTTP 402 payments: x402 and Cloudflare Pay per crawl | A server answers 402 Payment Required with a price, and the client pays and retries. x402 is an open protocol governed by the x402 Foundation at the Linux Foundation. Pay per crawl is a Cloudflare product in private beta. |
Charge for a copy the same way as for its page. |
Guidance for publishers
These are recommendations, not rules of the specification.
- Treat the Markdown copy like the page. Whatever applies to a page, apply to its copy: its license, its rights reservation, its paywall, its access gate, and its price. Most of these are set per URL, and a copy has its own URL, so check that your rules cover
.mdfiles too. Otherwise the copy becomes the cheapest way around them. - Keep signals consistent with your terms. A signal is a preference, and it should never grant more than your license or rights reservation allows. Where they differ, expect agents to follow the stricter of the two.
- Point to your terms from each copy. An agent that arrives at one copy may never read your
robots.txt. Until the specification defines a field for it, add anx-termsfield to each copy's front matter, with the URL of your license, for examplex-terms: https://<your-site>/license.xml. Thex-prefix is how Altdown marks extension fields.
Under discussion for the specification
Three changes are being considered for version 1.0. Comments are welcome as issues on GitHub.
- Access. A rule that a copy must be subject to the same terms and access conditions as its page, and that an agent must apply the page's terms to its copy.
- Precedence. A rule that a signal never grants more than the publisher's other terms, such as a license, a rights reservation, or
robots.txt. - A
termsfield. An optional front matter field that points to the license that applies to the copy, such as an RSL document.