Google plans to support shared AI training control via robots.txt

On October 30, 2026, Google announced plans to support a shared policy token in robots.txt, letting site operators express their training-use preferences to all participating AI providers at once. The mechanism is based on work in the IETF AI Preferences working group and evolves from Google-Extended, which Google has offered since 2023; if a site uses the token to refuse training and does not separately specify Google-Extended, Google will treat it as a refusal of Google-Extended, and each provider may also handle the signal on its own. OpenAI said the same day that it will respect the general robots.txt signal, plans to implement it within months, and calls on other providers to follow; Microsoft also announced adoption, saying its new setting replaces NoArchive and NoCache and applies from February 1, 2027, and sites using the old tags need to update by March 1, 2027.