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fix(agent-readiness): aipref attachment draft expired — say so on Content Signals #131

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jdevalk merged 3 commits into from
Jul 31, 2026
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fix(agent-readiness): aipref attachment draft expired — say so on Content Signals #131

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fix(agent-readiness): aipref attachment draft expired — say so on Con…
jdevalk Jul 28, 2026
c81c5c6
fix(agent-readiness): correct the aipref attach expiry date and dormancy
jdevalk Jul 28, 2026
d709c2e
Merge branch 'main' into fix/aipref-attach-draft-expired-2026-07-28
jdevalk Jul 31, 2026
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8 changes: 5 additions & 3 deletions src/content/spec/agent-readiness/content-signals.md
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Expand Up @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ status: optional
order: 42
appliesTo: [all]
relatedSlugs: [robots-for-ai-crawlers, robots-txt, agent-readiness-overview, web-bot-auth]
updated: "2026-05-29T12:14:17.000Z"
updated: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
sources:
- title: "IETF AI Preferences WG (aipref) — drafts"
url: "https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/aipref/documents/"
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -43,12 +43,14 @@ Each takes `yes` or `no`. Multiple values are comma-separated on a single `Conte

## Status of the proposal

This is **not yet a settled standard**. The work is split across two ongoing efforts:
This is **not yet a settled standard**, and the two halves of it are in very different health. The work is split across two efforts:

- The **IETF AI Preferences working group ([aipref](https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/aipref/documents/))** is working on a vocabulary and protocol-level definition.
- The **IAB Tech Lab Content Signals project** has published a parallel specification aimed at industry adoption.

Drafts have been circulating since 2024 and the vocabulary is converging. Treat Content Signals as recommended-to-experiment-with, not as a finalised standard. The directive will be ignored by every crawler that does not yet parse it — which today is most of them.
Inside the IETF work, separate the *vocabulary* from the *attachment mechanism*. The vocabulary — what `search`, `ai-input` and `ai-train` mean — is alive and was being edited for publication as recently as April 2026 ([draft-ietf-aipref-vocab](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-aipref-vocab/)). The document that would define how you actually bind those preferences to content over HTTP, [draft-ietf-aipref-attach](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-aipref-attach/), **expired on 1 May 2026** and has not been reposted; its text has seen no edits in the working group's repository since September 2025. So the part of Content Signals a site can act on today — a line in `robots.txt` — currently rests on the IAB Tech Lab specification and on validator convention, not on a live IETF draft.

That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason to expect the syntax to move. Treat Content Signals as recommended-to-experiment-with, not as a finalised standard. The directive will be ignored by every crawler that does not yet parse it — which today is most of them.

## Why it matters

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