Google Is Exploring Alternatives To The 30 Year Old Robots.txt Protocol

Google is on a quest to venture into fresh and inventive avenues for governing the way it scours and organizes web content.

Their relentless pursuit of innovative ways to control crawling and indexing goes beyond the 30-year-old robots.txt protocol.

Here Is What Google Has Added:

“One such community-developed web standard, robots.txt, was created nearly 30 years ago and has proven to be a simple and transparent way for web publishers to control how search engines crawl their content. We believe it’s time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases.”

Google has extended a warm invitation to members of the vibrant web and AI communities. Urging them to join in an exciting dialogue about a cutting-edge protocol.

This initiative aims to foster collaborative discussions, brainstorming sessions, and knowledge sharing, as together they explore.

We have all become accused of allowing bot access to our websites by using robots.txt. And other forms of newer structured data. But we may be looking at new methods in the future. What those methods and protocols may look like is unknown right now but the discussion is happening.