Is there a standard for telling bots "this page was never meant to last"?
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.
I also shipped a validator, an AI suggestion tool, a JS widget, an npm package, and a WordPress plugin alongside the spec.
Two questions for this community:
Would you use this on your own site or projects?
What state is missing from the vocabulary?
Happy to answer questions.
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