What KnownGood-Verifier is, and how to control it.

01Block or limit us — right now, no waiting

If you want us gone, add this to your robots.txt. We check it on every visit and honour it immediately; a disallow takes effect on our next request, and we cache your rules so we won't re-probe you.

User-agent: KnownGood-Verifier
Disallow: /

Prefer to stay listed but slow us down? Set a crawl delay:

User-agent: KnownGood-Verifier
Crawl-delay: 30

And if your only concern is AI use of your content generally, the Content Signals standard lets you say so once, to every AI crawler at once. We treat ai-input=no as a hard stop: we will not list or re-probe a site that declares it, regardless of anything else on the page.

Every “no” we honour, in order. robots.txt Disallow for our user-agent — binding (RFC 9309); a robots.txt that answers 5xx or 429, or cannot be reached, is treated as a “no” too. ai-input=no — the Content Signals convention; we treat it as binding. Content-Usage: search=n as a header or a robots.txt line — the IETF AI Preferences draft, not yet an RFC, honoured now. X-Robots-Tag: noai or the equivalent meta tag — informal, no standard behind it, honoured as a courtesy because a site that wrote it meant it.

How a site comes to be checked. We check a site when it declares agents welcome in robots.txt, or publishes an agent endpoint — an MCP server card, an API catalog, an llms.txt — or appears in a public MCP registry, or an owner asks at /submit. Publishing an endpoint for agents is an invitation to agents; we treat it as one. If that is not what you meant, the lines above stop us.

02What it actually does

KnownGood-Verifier checks whether an AI agent — the kind a real person now sends to browse, compare, and act on their behalf — can actually read and use your site. It's how we build Known Good, an index of the sites that pass. It is a verifier, not a scraper: it reads a handful of standard files to assess readiness. It does not harvest your content, your prices, or your customer data.

03Verify it's really us

Anyone can put our name in a user-agent string. To confirm a request is genuinely from KnownGood-Verifier and not an impostor borrowing our name, check that the source IP falls within our published range — spoofed traffic wearing our UA will not.

Seeing our name from an IP outside that range? That's someone spoofing us — block it, and if you like, tell us at the address below so we can flag it.

04Our commitments

• We honour robots.txt for our user-agent, every visit.
• We treat ai-input=no as a hard opt-out — never listed, never re-probed.
• We identify ourselves honestly and never disguise our user-agent.
• We rate-limit ourselves to stay a negligible load on your server.
• We collect no personal data and store no content beyond readiness signals.
• If we ever get something wrong, one email stops us.

05How this site lists its own pages

Our own pages are built for crawlers the way we ask others to build theirs.

• A listing shows 25 sites a page, or 100 when that would take more than 25 pages; a listing still longer splits by the first letter of the domain, and a letter still longer by its second, so every page bar shows every page number and never scrolls.
• The sitemap index lists the strongest report pages first, and the next file of them is listed when Google’s smartphone crawler has averaged more than 100 requests a day to this site over seven days and fewer than half of the report pages already listed are still reported as discovered but not indexed.

06Contact

Questions, complaints, or a request to stop entirely — reach a human at bot@knowngood.sh. We answer, and we act on it.