The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, announced September 10, lets publishers set clear payment terms for AI crawlers that scrape their websites. Companies can now demand fees every time an AI system reads their content or uses it to answer questions. Pay-per-inference means AI companies pay only when they actually use the content to generate responses. “We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet,” said Eckart Walther, who co-created both RSS and the new RSL standard. AI companies have increasingly turned to paid licensing deals to avoid legal troubles.