AI-readiness
IETF AI Preferences (aipref)
The IETF working group standardizing how sites express AI training / inference preferences. Likely to subsume ai.txt, llms.txt opt-out semantics, and the messy patchwork of robots.txt AI directives.
What it is
IETF AI Preferences (aipref) Working Group — chartered 2024, milestones target August 2026. Three deliverables: (1) a vocabulary for AI-related preferences (training, search, inference); (2) protocol bindings for attaching those preferences to content (HTTP headers, well-known URIs, in-body metadata); (3) a reconciliation method for conflicting signals. Chairs: Mark Nottingham + Suresh Krishnan.
Why it matters
The current opt-out landscape is a mess — robots.txt for crawlers, ai.txt for training, X-Robots-Tag, ad-hoc TDM Reservation Protocol, schema.org content-license — all incompatible. aipref is the credible path to one signal that AI labs, regulators, and CMS vendors all parse. Standards adoption is years out, but tracking the draft now lets you align ai.txt and robots.txt directives with the eventual format.
Who it applies to
Anyone tracking AI policy or building tooling around training opt-outs.
How WQI scores it
Web Quality Index considers this standard satisfied when the supporting factor passes.
| # | Factor | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | AI crawler robots.txt directives | live |
Related standards
- See also
- ai.txt , AI crawlers , llms.txt