Protecting User Choice

AI is rapidly transforming nearly every aspect of our world, including the way we create and consume content. At Automattic, we've always believed in a free and open web and individual choice. Like other tech companies, we're closely following these advancements, including how to work with AI companies in a way that respects our users' preferences.

With that in mind, we're doing a number of things at WordPress.com and Tumblr to give you more control over the content you've created.

• We currently block, by default, major AI platform crawlers-including ones from the biggest tech companies-and update our lists as new ones launch.
• We have a setting to discourage search engines from indexing a site on WordPress.com and Tumblr. This signals to search engines not to crawl that content or include it in search results.
• We have added similar settings to WordPress.com and Tumblr to discourage crawling by AI companies. If you already discourage search engine indexing, this is automatically enabled.

Currently, no law exists that requires crawlers to follow these preferences, though this may change soon with pending legislation in the European Union. Regardless of geographic location, we want to provide you tools that grant as much control as possible. Since respectable companies do follow these settings, they're the best method to enforce how content is crawled on the web.

We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.

• We will only share public content that's hosted on WordPress.com and Tumblr, and only from sites that haven't opted out.
• We are not including content from sites hosted elsewhere even if they use Automattic plugins like Jetpack or WooCommerce.

Our partnerships will respect all opt-out settings. We also plan to take that a step further and regularly update any partners about people who newly opt out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.