ai.txt

Flowpane checks /ai.txt as an optional community / Flowpane-supported convention for publishing machine-readable AI-use preferences or policy intent.

ai.txt is not an RFC, a universally adopted standard, a robots.txt replacement, or a legal or technical enforcement mechanism. A value such as AI-Training: no records declared intent; it does not guarantee that crawlers or model providers will comply.

What Flowpane recognises

Flowpane's current root-file dialect uses Key: Value lines and # comments. It recognises AI-Policy; AI-Training, AI-Input, AI-Search, and AI-Scraping; Contact and License; Preferred-Model and Blocked-Model; Canonical; and Expires.

Stance fields accept yes, no, or conditional. Expires is an optional Flowpane extension using YYYY-MM-DD. These fields are Flowpane's supported product contract. Current IETF work uses different attachment mechanisms and does not define this exact root-file grammar.

Unknown extension fields are preserved and shown as informational metadata. Flowpane does not remove or penalise them.

What the check validates

Flowpane checks observable plain-text structure, recognised stance tokens, Contact syntax, and Expires date syntax and staleness. It does not test contact or linked-reference reachability, policy enforceability, legal effect, crawler compliance, or whether a model used the content.

Missing Contact is a policy recommendation, not pure Information; under the current ai.txt formula it carries the retained two-point recommendation deduction. License and policy presence are contextual facts, not defects and remain score-neutral. A past Expires value means the declaration may need review; it is not RFC-style expiry.

Missing files and scoring

When the live file is missing, the observed ai.txt score is 0/100. It contributes to the Site score at Flowpane's configured weight of 6. The interface describes the file as recommended or required according to the Site's existing relevance context; external practice remains optional.

Creating, editing, validating, reviewing or saving a draft does not change the observed status or score. The fixed-file Workbench cannot deploy ai.txt; publication must happen through a separately authorised external process, followed by a later public check.

Starter safety

Flowpane's starter is a comments-only review draft. It chooses no policy stance and invents no contact, licence, policy URL, or expiry date. Review it with the organisation's policy owner before uncommenting any declaration.

AI Assist is available for ai.txt under the shared C2 contract. It receives only bounded factual context and deterministic findings, must preserve authored/unknown content, and may not invent organisation facts, contacts, licences, policy URLs or stance decisions. Its output must pass factual-safety and exact deterministic validation before replacing Proposed text. It remains an unsigned, non-publishing draft and consumes customer allowance only after successful durable accounting.