Citation and licensing

Citation preference and licensing

In short: Say how you’d like to be cited, with your canonical URL, and state your content licence or usage terms for AI use, such as quoting or training.

Category: Compliance & Trust · weight 10 of 100 within the category
Compliance & Trust is worth 20 in regulated, 10 in generic and commerce, 5 in technical (points of 100, by scoring profile)
Audit ID P6 (as shown on reports) · rubric v2.1

What it checks

Whether the file says how you’d like to be cited, and on what terms content may be used by AI systems.

Why it matters

Agents that cite you can point users to the canonical source. Usage terms set expectations for how your content is reused.

When it applies

Opt-in (rubric v2.1). Applies only when your llms.txt declares an industry with an Industry: line (before the first section, in ## Identity, or in a section whose heading starts with “Compliance”) and that industry’s playbook is published with reviewer-signed rules. Up to three industries; values we don’t know are reported, not scored. Without a declaration, or while a declared playbook awaits sign-off, the whole Compliance & Trust category is Not applicable and its weight is redistributed: not declaring never costs points, and we never grade you against rules nobody has signed off.

An audit that doesn't apply, or that we couldn't verify, is removed from your score and its weight shared among the Compliance & Trust audits that do apply. It is never scored as a zero.

How it's scored

0.5 for a citation preference (an item asking to cite or attribute you, with a URL, link or canonical) + 0.5 for content licensing (a licence, copyright or permission statement about your content that speaks to AI, models, training or crawlers).

How to fix

Say how you’d like to be cited (name and canonical URL).
State your content licence or usage terms for AI use, or link to them with a sentence that says what they allow.
Point to the canonical page for facts you want quoted exactly.

Example

## Citation and use

- Please cite “Acme Payments” and link the canonical URL, https://acme.com.
- Content licence: AI assistants may quote and summarise our pages with attribution; see https://acme.com/terms. Do not use our content to train models without permission.

Frequently asked questions

How do I tell AI agents how to cite my site in llms.txt?

Say the name you want used and the canonical URL to link, e.g. “Please cite ‘Acme Homes’ and link the canonical URL, https://acme.com.” That earns half of this audit; a content licence or usage terms that speak to AI use (quoting, summarising, training) earn the other half. The llms.txt specification requires only the H1, so a short citation section is yours to add.

Sources: LLMSRank: Citation and licensing · llms.txt specification

Should we put a Creative Commons licence on the content our llms.txt links to?

That is a business and legal decision; the audit only looks for a clear statement of your terms for AI use. If you do use one, name it exactly: CC BY 4.0, for instance, lets others reuse the material provided they give credit, link the licence and indicate changes, while the NC and ND variants rule out commercial use or adaptations. Keep in mind a statement in llms.txt is a request to readers; crawl access itself is governed by robots.txt.

Sources: Creative Commons: CC BY 4.0 · Creative Commons: about the licenses · LLMSRank: Citation and licensing

What counts as content licensing for this audit?

A sentence that names a licence, copyright or permission for your content and says how AI systems may use it, e.g. “Content licence: AI assistants may quote and summarise our pages with attribution; do not use our content to train models without permission.” A bare link to your terms of use, or a professional licence (“a licensed agent”), doesn’t count.

Sources: LLMSRank: Citation and licensing

Citation applies to every website, so why is Citation and licensing Not applicable for mine?

Because it sits in the Compliance & Trust category, which since rubric v2.1 applies only when your llms.txt declares an industry whose playbook is published. The scoring spec lists citation as always applicable, but the registry gates it with the rest of the category.

Sources: LLMSRank: Citation and licensing · LLMSRank method

In your research, did any site state a citation preference or licence terms?

In our research (187 sites, corpus captured 2026-10-10, scored with rubric v2.1), one file names an industry — att.com writes “Telecommunications” — and no playbook covers it, so this audit still applies to none of them. Under rubric v2.0 it applied to 7 homebuilders and brokerages matched by a domain list, which v2.1 retired. Under v2.0 this audit was a constant 0; v2.1 reads citation and licensing statements from the file.

Sources: LLMSRank method · LLMSRank: Citation and licensing