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Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Adopted by Reddit, Yahoo, and Medium: A 30 Day Marketing Playbook
A new web standard gives publishers control to set, meter, and monetize AI access. Use this 30 day plan to publish RSL in robots.txt, test inclusion versus paid licensing with answer engines, and track KPIs for assistant referrals, citations, and revenue.
Vicky
Oct 2, 2025
The headline shift you cannot ignore
This piece describes how Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and others adopted Really Simple Licensing (RSL) to attach machine-readable terms to content for AI access. It explains how robots.txt becomes a front door with a rate card, and summarizes the 30 day marketing playbook including Week 1 baseline terms, Week 2 inclusion vs paid tests, Week 3 price testing, Week 4 KPIs, and implementation tips. It also covers measurement of assistant referrals, model citations, licensing revenue, and governance, plus guidance for talking to executives and avoiding common pitfalls. The plan assumes collaboration with product and legal, and outlines how to publish a baseline license, test inclusion against licensing, and instrument dashboards for quarterly reviews.