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AI permissions

A site can tell AI systems and search engines what they are allowed to use its content for. This is done on the Content-Signal line of the site's robots.txt file. It is a standard proposal by the AI Preferences working group that major players (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Common Crawl) have committed to honoring.

By default, sites have no Content-Signal line. The site's robots.txt allows everything, so search engines and AI systems may use the content freely. For a marketing site this is usually the right choice, because its job is to be found.

If you want to restrict use, ask Kamu in Studio or the Assistant to add the line, for example: "Block my content from being used for AI training."

The three permissions​

  • search: whether the content may appear in search results (traditional search engines and AI-based search engines like Perplexity).
  • ai-input: whether an AI assistant (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) may fetch information from your page when a user asks it something. This is how customers find businesses through AI assistants.
  • ai-train: whether your content may end up in AI models' training data, i.e. become part of the "memory" of future models. This is different from ai-input: training happens once in advance, usage happens every time someone asks.

Each value is either yes or no.

When to choose no?​

Most businesses have no reason to restrict any of these, but a restriction can be justified:

  • ai-train=no: if your content is unique expert writing you do not want absorbed into general AI models. A user can still find you via an AI assistant.
  • ai-input=no: if you do not want AI assistants to fetch information from your page at all. This is a strong restriction and weakens your visibility in AI searches.
  • search=no: effectively hides your site from search engines. A very rare choice for a public marketing site.

Changing the settings​

Example requests for Kamu:

  • "Block training use but allow everything else."
  • "Block AI searches entirely."
  • "Remove the AI restrictions from robots.txt." (restores the default)

After publishing, the change shows up in your site's robots.txt (at https://your-site.fi/robots.txt), for example like this:

User-agent: *
Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://your-site.fi/sitemap-index.xml

Notes​

  • Content-Signal is a declaration mechanism, not a technical barrier. It relies on AI operators reading and respecting the file, the same way traditional robots.txt works.
  • The settings only apply going forward. If your content has already ended up in some model's training data, ai-train=no does not remove it from there.
  • You can check your site's current state at isitagentready.com by entering your site's address.