Enforcement
Voluntary preference signal. Communicates a requested condition or restriction to automated systems.
It only affects actors that detect and honor the signal; it does not itself prevent reuse.
Catalog status describes public availability, not legal validity, adoption, or proven effectiveness.
What it is
NoML proposes a simple extension to existing robots-style signaling: a noml value that can be added to HTML meta tags or X-Robots-Tag headers. The goal is to let publishers keep content discoverable in search while separately asking that it not be used for machine learning.
It is intentionally lightweight and easy to deploy, but it remains an advocacy proposal rather than a settled web standard.
NoML publishes or proposes a machine-readable preference signal for web content across the collection and training stages. The signal communicates requested conditions; compliance depends on discovery, interpretation, and voluntary support by downstream systems. The initiative is archived as dormant; the newest dated source in this profile is “Mojeek publishes NoML proposal and open letter” (October 25, 2023). These details describe the published mechanism and evidence, not a finding about legal validity, adoption, or effectiveness.
Limitations
NoML is a proposal rather than a broadly adopted standard, and it depends on voluntary compliance by crawlers, search engines, and downstream API users.
Evidence trail
- Oct 25, 2023 · Primary sourceMojeek publishes NoML proposal and open letter
Adoption signals
No public adoption figure found.