Tell artificial intelligence companies which pages they may read.

Find out which companies are allowed to read your website

Every website keeps a short list of instructions for the machines that visit it. Most people have never read their own, and the ones who have are usually surprised.

Paste yours in and it tells you, in ordinary words, which artificial intelligence companies you are letting read your pages, which you are turning away, and whether you are letting them quote you, train on what you wrote, or both.

What it will not doThat list is a request, not a lock. Well-behaved machines obey it. Badly behaved ones ignore it, and no file on your website can stop them.

Write that list of instructions

Rather than guessing at it. It knows the shape each kind of website needs, it gives you a switch for each company so you can decide one at a time, and it reads back what you have written to check it makes sense.

What it will not doSame as the one before it: the list is a request. It tells well-behaved machines what you want, and cannot force the others.

Write a short note telling artificial intelligence assistants what your website is about

A new and growing habit: a short plain-language file that says what your website is and which pages are worth reading. This writes it.

What it will not doThis is a habit, not a rule, and not all artificial intelligence companies pay attention to it. It costs almost nothing to have one. Do not expect it to do more than it does.

Tell search engines what kind of thing your page is

So that a recipe is understood as a recipe, an event as an event, and a business as a business. It covers twenty-two kinds of thing and checks your work before you publish.

What it will not doDoing this correctly makes you eligible to appear in a fancier search result. Search engines decide the rest, and they change their minds.

Check that your text is dark enough to read

Against the background you have put it on, including for people whose eyesight is not strong. When a pair of colours fails, it finds you the nearest colour that passes, so you are not left guessing.

What it will not doThis is one check out of many. Passing it does not make a page easy for everybody to use. It makes one specific, measurable thing correct.