Section Settings & Optional Fields

Every section in your license has a configuration area at the top of the centre panel. This article covers each field — one required, four optional — and when you'd actually use them.

Section URL Pattern (required)

The Section URL Pattern is the only required field, and the most important one — it defines which pages this section's licensing rules apply to.

The pattern supports wildcards:

• /*  — every page on the site
• /articles/*  — only your articles directory
• /archive/*  — just your archive
• /api/v1/content/*  — a specific API endpoint

This is how you apply different licensing rules to different parts of your site. If you want your blog posts to have one set of terms and your data feeds to have another, create two sections with two different URL patterns.

For most publishers starting out, /*  is the right default — one consistent policy across your entire site.

Last Modified (optional)

Lets you declare the date and time this section's content was last updated, which gets embedded in the license XML. Some compliant crawlers use this signal to decide whether to re-fetch content.

• If you maintain a section covering content that updates frequently, you might leave this blank and manage it dynamically.
• If you have an archive section of static content that never changes, setting a last modified date is a useful signal to crawlers that they don't need to re-process it.

Alternates (optional)

Lets you expose additional or simplified versions of the content covered by this section — things like a plain text version, a JSON feed, a web archive, or a Markdown export.

Any URLs you add here get covered under the same licensing terms as the parent section. So if you have an API endpoint that serves the same articles as your web pages, you can list it as an alternate rather than creating a separate section with duplicate rules.

Use the + Add Alternate button to add URLs. Most publishers won't need this initially — it's most useful if you're licensing content that's available in multiple formats.

Copyright & Terms (optional)

This is where you embed your ownership and legal contact information directly into the license, making your rights machine-readable, not just human-readable.

• Holder Type — select either Person or Organisation, then fill in the Copyright Holder Name. For most publishers this will be your company name.
• Contact Email and Contact URL — give AI companies and crawler operators a direct route to reach you for licensing enquiries. If someone wants to negotiate a custom deal, or there's a compliance question, this is how they find you without having to search your site for a contact page.
• License Terms URL — a link to your full human-readable terms of service or licensing policy document. This bridges the machine-readable RSL and the legal document your lawyers wrote, keeping the full terms one click away from the license itself.

Tip: filling this in is good practice even if you don't have a formal licensing deal yet. It signals professionalism to AI companies reviewing your license and makes it easier for them to reach you when they want to negotiate.

Schema (optional)

The most technical of the optional fields. It lets you attach schema.org structured data to this section, giving crawlers richer context about what kind of content is covered.

You can either:

• Provide a Schema URL pointing to an external schema.org JSON-LD file, or
• Use Switch to inline schema to paste the schema directly into the editor.

This is particularly useful for publishers with well-defined content types — news articles, datasets, academic papers, product catalogues — where schema.org vocabulary already describes your content accurately. It's entirely optional, and most publishers can get fully up and running without touching this field.