Content Signals is a Cloudflare-introduced convention for expressing, in robots.txt, how content may be used after it is accessed: search (indexing and links), ai-input (feeding content into AI answers in real time) and ai-train (training or fine-tuning models). Compliance is voluntary.
Content Signals
Content Signals extends robots.txt from whether a crawler may fetch to what it may do with the content: search, ai-input and ai-train, each set to yes or no. Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt sets search to yes and ai-train to no and leaves ai-input unset. The signals are preferences; enforcement is up to the crawler, and Cloudflare suggests pairing them with its crawler controls. The IETF AI Preferences working group is standardizing a related vocabulary.
Business layer
The API Commons ai-preferences schema profiles Content Signals and AIPREF rather than defining new terms. See The Technical Side Translated. The Business Side Did Not.
Industry: cross-domain
