Every major crawler respects robots.txt. It was written in 1994, has no formal standard, and tells bots one thing: where not to go.

That's it. That's the entire vocabulary the web has for communicating with automated agents.

In 2026, those agents are archiving pages, training AI models, extracting authorship, and building knowledge graphs and the only signal a page can send is "don't crawl me at all" or silence.

Last year I published a rough draft, forgot about it, and months later found it cited in an AI-generated summary as if it were my considered opinion. The page had no way to say "this was never finished."

robots.txt has been solving the wrong problem for 30 years. It controls access not intent. There's no standard way to mark a page as draft, temporary, or anonymous before a crawler decides what to do with it.

I've been working on a tiny protocol for the past few months and wanted to get feedback from this community before I launch.

The problem: robots.txt tells crawlers where not to go. But nothing tells them what the content is draft, temporary, anonymous, AI-generated. A crawler has no way to know the difference between a published article and a throwaway thought.

I spec'd out something called the Untitled Protocol one meta tag or HTTP header with six states: now, draft, ephemeral, anonymous, collective, generative.