Bing decided not to wait for the alternative approach to a robots.txt method for blocking AI tools from using your content and decided to go with what is out there now, meta tag approaches.
Bing will continue to work with the rest of the AI community to come up with solutions but for now, since Bing Chat is out there, Bing is offering site owners these options.
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing said, "While we are actively collaborating with the industry on establishing future AI standards, we also wanted to provide more immediate support for publishers." We are pleased to share that we have built on existing standard webmaster controls to empower publishers to control use of their content in Bing Chat and for training Microsoft’s generative AI models. Webmasters have the choice of implementing these controls as follows:"
- No action is needed to remain in Bing Chat. Content without NOCACHE tag and without NOARCHIVE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers and will benefit from AI's ability to generate more helpful answers and to increase your ranking opportunities in Bing Chat; site content may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.
- Content with the NOCACHE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers. Bing will only display URL/Snippet/Title in the answer; Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOCACHE, only URLs, Titles and Snippets may be used in training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- Content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers, not be linked to in the answers. Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOARCHIVE, Bing will not use the content for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- If content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, we will treat it as NOCACHE.
"We can assure publishers that content with the NOCACHE tag or NOARCHIVE tag will still appear in our search results," Fabrice added.
Also, site owners or publishers who want strict control over their content can use the NOCACHE option to allow Bing Chat to refer to their websites, Bing explained. "To help Bing chat users find paywall articles, we recommend adding the NOCACHE value to the NOARCHIVE value, since many paywall sites use only the NOARCHIVE tag," Bing added.
More details can be found here.
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