Copyright AI Content Licensing – Block AI Crawlers + Get Paid

Description

Block AI crawlers from scraping your site, or license your content and get paid. Your site, your choice.

AI companies are crawling your WordPress site right now. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok – they’re all here, training on your content without asking. This plugin gives you two options: either block them with robots.txt, or add machine-readable licensing terms so compliant AI companies can pay you.

Here’s what makes this different: we do BOTH blocking AND licensing. Most services only do one or the other. We built the infrastructure to do both properly.

The Reality of AI Crawler Blocking

robots.txt is a voluntary standard – While OpenAI and Anthropic claim to respect robots.txt, the reality is more complex. Recent investigations by TollBit and Cloudflare found evidence of major AI companies bypassing blocks, and Perplexity was caught using undisclosed IPs to scrape sites that blocked their official crawler. Industry data shows 12.9% of bots now ignore robots.txt (up from 3.3%), with 26 million bypasses in March 2025 alone.

Why blocking still matters: Even as a voluntary measure, robots.txt raises the legal and technical barrier. It establishes clear notice of your access terms, strengthening your legal position if you need to enforce your rights. Most legitimate AI companies do respect it – but you need backup enforcement.

Coming Soon: HTTP 402 “Payment Required” Protocol

We’re implementing the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code protocol. When an AI bot hits your site without a valid license, we’ll serve a 402 response with your licensing terms in machine-readable format.

Transparency: This is also a voluntary protocol. Cloudflare launched their “Pay Per Crawl” implementation on July 1, 2025, and now serves over 1 billion 402 responses daily – but it’s currently in private beta limited to select major publications. Like robots.txt, HTTP 402 requires AI companies to cooperate. The difference is it’s newer, more standardized, and creates clearer legal standing for enforcement.

The Stick AND The Carrot

This plugin already blocks AI crawlers via robots.txt (the stick). Soon we’ll add x402 protocol enforcement (bigger stick). But you can also license your content and earn money from AI companies that want to do the right thing (the carrot).

Most creators don’t realize: News Corp got $250M+ from OpenAI. Reddit got $60M/year. The EU AI Act now requires licensed training data. The licensing market exists – it’s just been locked to big publishers. Until now.

Why WordPress Creators Need This Now

The traffic apocalypse is real. In 2025, 60% of Google searches end without any click to external sites – up from 44.2% just a year ago. When users do click, only 360 clicks per 1,000 searches go to the open web (374 in EU). The rest? 14.3% go to Google-owned properties like YouTube and Maps. For the first time in a decade, Google now keeps 90% of its ad revenue internally, with only 10% going to network publishers.

This isn’t theoretical – it’s happening right now. ChatGPT and Gemini answer questions using your content, but users never visit your site. Your ad revenue collapses. Your subscription model breaks when AI gives your insights away for free.

AI content licensing is the survival strategy. The big publishers already figured this out. News Corp got over $250M from OpenAI (5-year deal). Reddit: $60M/year. Nine major publishers have signed deals including Financial Times, Associated Press, Le Monde, and Axel Springer. Meanwhile, individual WordPress site owners – the backbone of the open web – get nothing while AI companies scrape freely.

WordPress is where we make our stand. Dave Winer, who invented blogging 30 years ago and co-created RSS, is now championing WordPress as the foundation for the independent web’s renaissance. In his 2025 writings and WordCamp Canada keynote, he argues that WordPress represents the “read/write web” Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned – where creators own their content and control their distribution. While social media captured one generation of creativity and tech giants bought up the rest, WordPress remains the last great bastion of independent publishing. It’s where 43% of the web lives. It’s where creators still own their content.

That changes today.

EU AI Act Compliance

The EU AI Act now mandates that AI companies must respect opt-out mechanisms and maintain licensing documentation for training data. This plugin provides:

• Enforceable crawl terms via robots.txt and upcoming x402 protocol
• Opt-in training licenses with clear pricing and attribution
• Compliant usage tracking that meets EU reporting requirements
• Monetization infrastructure so you get paid, not just compliance paperwork

For WordPress sites serving EU audiences, this isn’t just about money – it’s about legal compliance for the AI companies that want to use your content.

The Technology Behind It

We’ve built the first true content licensing infrastructure for AI:

License Grammar v1.5 – The emerging standard for machine-readable licensing. Our meta tag format works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and 100+ AI systems. It’s being adopted as the industry standard because it’s simple, parseable, and extensible.

Dual-axis licensing – Control both the AI use case (training vs inference) and distribution level (private vs public). You can allow free private research while charging for commercial usage. Or block training entirely while allowing inference. Your content, your rules.

Immutable ledger – When AI companies use your content, it’s logged with cryptographic verification. This creates legal standing if you need to enforce your terms. It’s not just “hoping they comply” – it’s building an audit trail.

Layered protection – robots.txt provides the first barrier (voluntary but creates legal notice). Machine-readable licenses give compliant AI companies clear terms. The upcoming HTTP 402 protocol adds standardized payment signaling. Each layer strengthens your legal position.

How It Actually Works

1. Install the plugin (literally 1 minute)
Search “Copyright.sh AI License” in your WordPress plugins, install, activate. Done.

2. Pick your approach
– Want to block all AI crawlers? Set policy to “Deny” and enable the robots.txt blocker.
– Want to get paid? Set “Allow”, pick a price (we suggest $0.10 per 1K tokens), and connect your account.
– Want both? You can block most crawlers and whitelist specific ones you want to license to.

3. It runs automatically
The plugin adds machine-readable license declarations to every page:
– HTML meta tags that AI systems check before crawling
– /ai-license.txt file at your domain root
– robots.txt entries that block non-compliant crawlers (optional)
– Coming soon: x402 HTTP responses that enforce payment requirements

4. Track what’s happening (if you’re licensing)
Dashboard at dashboard.copyright.sh shows which AI companies are using your content and what you’ve earned. Set up PayPal, Venmo, or Stripe for payouts.

What You Get

Blocking capabilities:
– robots.txt generator that blocks 100+ known AI crawlers (voluntary standard, but creates legal notice)
– Preserves Google, Bing, and other search engines (won’t hurt your search rankings)
– Optional – you can block all AI or just the ones that don’t pay
– Coming soon: HTTP 402 protocol support for standardized payment signaling

Licensing capabilities:
– Set prices per 1,000 tokens (industry standard pricing)
– Different rates for private vs public usage
– Per-post pricing overrides for premium content
– Support for different AI use cases (training, inference, embedding, fine-tuning)
– Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Perplexity, and 100+ other AI systems

Technical stuff:
– Uses License Grammar v1.5 specification (the standard AI companies are adopting)
– Magic link authentication – no passwords, no API keys to copy-paste
– Clean code, minimal performance impact
– Compatible with all major caching and SEO plugins

Works seamlessly with:
– WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache
– Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO
– Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder
– WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads
– Multisite installations

Who Should Use This

Honestly? Anyone with a WordPress site that AI companies might be scraping.

• Bloggers: Your old posts are training ChatGPT right now. Either block that or get paid for it.
• News sites: The big publishers are all licensing. You should too.
• Niche experts: Got specialized knowledge? That’s worth more to AI companies.
• Anyone who wants to block AI: You don’t have to license. You can just block all AI crawlers completely.

Why This Matters

The AI training data market is real. News Corp got $250M+. Reddit got $60M/year. The EU AI Act now mandates licensed training data. This isn’t hypothetical – it’s happening.

The difference is that until now, only massive publishers could negotiate these deals. This plugin gives individual site owners the same tools.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to license your content. If you just want to block AI companies from using your stuff, this plugin does that too. It’s your site, your content, your choice.

What Makes This Different: Competitor Comparison

Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl: Launched July 2025, enables website owners to charge AI crawlers per request. While technically sound, it’s limited to Cloudflare’s network infrastructure and uses a flat-rate pricing model that doesn’t account for content value variations. Major limitation: Only works if you’re already on Cloudflare’s platform and restricted to high value customers.

TollBit: AI content licensing platform that requires heavy configuration and subdomain setup (tollbit.example.com) and routes AI traffic through their infrastructure. Good for enterprise publishers but creates technical overhead and dependency on their network for content delivery.

Perplexity Comet Plus: The $5/month subscription service that validates the whole business model of content licensing. Perplexity shares 80% of the revenue they charge Comet Plus customers with publishers based on human visits and AI interactions. Revenue-sharing model is innovative, but success depends entirely on user subscription adoption and limited to Perplexity’s ecosystem.

RSL Protocol (Really Simple Licensing): Open standard for publishers to set explicit licenses and fees for AI content use. Supported by Reddit, Yahoo, and other major platforms. Technically solid but again requires learning a custom XML schema and lacks customizability on a per page basis. RSL is still in early adoption phase (i.e. not available) and requires AI companies to implement the protocol.

What we do differently: We provide both content protection (robots.txt blocking) and monetization (licensing with payment) in a single WordPress plugin. No subdomain required, no network dependency, no platform lock-in. Works with any hosting provider you run WordPress from. Install, configure (or don’t), done.

If/when RSL Protocol becomes widely adopted, we’ll support it too. Until then, we give you the most accessible and comprehensive AI content licensing solution available today.

AI Systems That Work With This

The plugin uses the Copyrightish AI-License Grammar v1.5, which is becoming the standard format for AI licensing:

Served via MCP plugin, compatible with OpenAI (ChatGPT, GPT models), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), xAI (Grok), Meta (Llama), Perplexity, Microsoft (Copilot), DeepSeek, Alibaba (Qwen), and 100+ other AI systems.

As new AI companies launch, they’re adopting the same standard. Your protection scales automatically.