What the RSL Standard Signals About the Future of Visibility in 2026

When Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and several of the web’s biggest content platforms announced a new Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, most coverage focused on the politics: platforms finally demanding compensation from AI companies; a new legal framework for training data; the good old open-web fight.

But if you take one step back, something bigger comes into focus.

For the first time, publishers are trying to engineer visibility – not for users, but for AI agents.
And advertisers should be paying attention.

Because when content owners start negotiating over what gets indexed, how it gets used, and who can afford to access it, the map of what AI sees – and therefore what users ultimately see – begins to shift.

A price tier is evolving 

RSL is simple on paper: add licensing terms to robots.txt that spell out whether AI systems can use your content, and under what conditions.

It includes options like:

– Free usage
– Attribution
– Subscription
– Pay-per-crawl
-Pay-per-inference (charging only when content is used in an answer)

In practice, this nudges the web toward something we haven’t openly admitted yet:

A tiered system where some content becomes expensive to include in AI models, and others become disproportionately cheaper simply because they’re accessible. 

Over the last year, this trend has accelerated. AI companies have signed licensing deals with the Associated Press, News Corp, Axel Springer, Reddit, and more – while quietly excluding sources that add legal or financial friction. 

I claim this will create a new hierarchy:

AI systems will begin avoiding licensed content because it increases legal or financial risk.

Open content will become disproportionately influential not because it’s authoritative, but because it’s accessible.

That will impact everything that depends on having a reliable sense of what people see and where they see it.

AI Search isn’t neutral 

For the last two decades, crawling was a given. A site went up, bots indexed it, and traffic followed (some) predictable logic.

RSL breaks that assumption. It turns indexing into a negotiation.

When AI systems – now agents – encounter licensed content, they face a choice: pay, ignore, or re-route.

And if the past year taught us anything, AI companies are more likely to exclude data sources that add friction.

The recent wave of lawsuits and settlements has shown that a single licensing dispute can reshape an entire training corpus.Behind the scenes, this changes how models “see” the web. Their understanding of topics, events, brands, and products will be shaped by availability and affordability. 

That is a problem for publishers.
But it’s also a problem for advertisers – because the rules of competition for attention are being rewritten by licensing terms inside a robots.txt file.

2026… the year visibility becomes negotiated

If 2024 and 2025 were the years publishers fought for licensing, 2026 is the year the economics settle.

The converging forces are making that inevitable:

1) Licensing becomes standardized: Publishers are forming coalitions, AI companies are formalizing tiers of access and premium data? A billable input.
2) AI search becomes the default interface: What AI decides not to see is becomes just as influential as what it includes
3) Regulation arrives: By 2026, visibility becomes negotiated and not a default 

Revisiting everything

If AI systems begin pulling from selective, unevenly licensed slices of the web, the “environment” in which a brand appears depends on which content was allowed to be indexed at all.

Some sites will influence generative results.
Some won’t.
Some will be invisible not because they’re irrelevant, but because they opted into a licensing structure AI companies don’t want to touch.

For advertisers, that means one thing:

You can’t trust the interface to tell you the whole story anymore. 

You need tools that can see the environment for you -across platforms, across contexts, across whatever comes next.

Advertisers need to know:

–  Where their ads actually appeared
–  What competed for attention
–  How their creative stacked up against its peers
–  Which environments elevated performance
–  Which quietly suppressed it

These are foundational questions, regardless of whether the web is open, licensed, conversational, or agentic.

Houston, we have a visibility problem

In a landscape that’s broken up into walled gardens, licensed gardens, and generative layers (built on increasingly  partial datasets), understanding the real environment around your brand becomes more important than ever.

RSL won’t fix the economics of publishing overnight.
It might not even hold AI companies accountable in the way its creators hope.

But it does mark a turning point. Platforms are starting to decide what AI can see, and AI… is deciding what users see.

This isn’t transparent. Advertisers can’t assume it is.

The open web may be changing shape, but the need for clarity hasn’t.