# AI usage policy page

> AI usage policy page: States the rules agents must follow and reduces licensing ambiguity. The fix: publish an AI usage policy.

- Source: /checks/ai-policy
- Site: AgenticWebScore
- Language: English

---
States the rules agents must follow and reduces licensing ambiguity.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Check id | `ai-policy` |
| Dimension | Bot Access Control (18%) |
| Tier | Essential — pool 80 pts |
| Weight inside tier | 2 |
| Impact | High |
| Maturity | Adopted — A ratified standard with real deployment. |
| Conditional | No |
| Publishing skill | `ai-policy` |
| Standards | — |

## What is measured

This check has no fixed probe path, so the scanner fetches the home page, collects its anchors and matches href or anchor text against AI-policy patterns (/ai-policy, /ai-usage-policy, /ai, /policies/ai, "AI usage policy") before fetching the match. It passes when a linked page states at least one permitted and one prohibited use of the content plus a contact route, returns partial when the page exists but is unlinked or carries no explicit permitted and prohibited statements, and fails when no policy page can be found.

## Reproduce it yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Run the same measurement against your own domain:

```bash
DOMAIN="example.com"
LINK=$(curl -sS "https://$DOMAIN/" | grep -Eio 'href="[^"]*(ai|artificial)[^"]*polic[^"]*"' | head -1 | cut -d'"' -f2); LINK=${LINK#https://$DOMAIN}; curl -sSL "https://$DOMAIN${LINK:-/ai-policy}" -o /tmp/ai-policy.html -w 'HTTP %{http_code} %{content_type}\n'; grep -Eio 'training|crawl|scrap|licen[cs]e|commercial|contact' /tmp/ai-policy.html | sort -u
```

## The fix

This is the artifact to ship. It is the complete change, not a description of one.

```html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>AI usage policy</title>
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/ai-policy">
</head>
<body>
  <h1>AI usage policy</h1>
  <p>Effective 2026-10-08. These rules govern automated access to example.com.</p>
  <h2>Permitted</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>Indexing, retrieval and citation by identified search and answer engines.</li>
    <li>Summarising public pages with attribution and a link to the source.</li>
  </ul>
  <h2>Not permitted</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>Training, fine-tuning or distilling a model on our content.</li>
    <li>Bulk scraping, resale or republishing content as a substitute for the original.</li>
  </ul>
  <h2>Contact</h2>
  <p>Licensing and corrections: <a href="mailto:agents@example.com">agents@example.com</a></p>
</body>
</html>
```

> Because this check has no fixed probe path, the page must be linked from the home page — add a footer link such as <a href="/ai-policy">AI usage policy</a>, otherwise the scanner never sees it.

## Related checks

| Check | Tier | Impact | Same skill |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `webbotauth` — Web Bot Auth key directory | Essential | Critical | — |
| `agent-permissions` — Agent permission model (agent-permissions.json) | Essential | Critical | — |
| `ai-rules` — Named AI bot rules in robots.txt | Essential | High | — |
| `bot-page` — Crawler and agent policy page | Recommended | Medium | — |
| `security-txt` — security.txt (RFC 9116) | Recommended | Low | — |
| `crawl-delay` — Crawl rate declaration | Emerging | Low | — |
| `ai-txt` — /ai.txt access declaration | Emerging | Low | — |