For site owners

Get listed in the standard

You do not fill a public submit form. Work in CiteFleet. Probe the origin first, compile the files, then CiteFleet verifies and publishes.

  1. 01

    Work with CiteFleet

    CiteFleet audits the origin: live routes, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt, and owner control. Search consoles and CMS logins stay there. BotCentral never signs into Bing or Google.

  2. 02

    Prove the domain

    Place DNS TXT botcentral-verify=<token>, or serve the same token as plain text at https://{domain}/.well-known/botcentral.txt. An SPA that returns HTML 200 for that path is rejected. Off-host URLs are rejected.

  3. 03

    Declare consent, not just allow_bots

    Retrieve, train, and act are separate. The 1.1 default is retrieve yes, train no, act no, TDM reserved. Compile robots.txt from that card so named training crawlers are Disallow: / and user-fetches stay allowed.

  4. 04

    Match robots to the card

    The live robots.txt must allow the agents named on the card. A later Disallow: / unpublishes the record on revalidation. Control tokens (Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended) belong in robots.txt even though they are not HTTP User-Agents.

  5. 05

    CiteFleet publishes the 1.1 card

    The private channel writes the catalog only after proof. Bots never publish. Mentions, social posts, and press are out of scope.

What a listing costs

  • $10.00 USD per host per year, charged once ownership is proven and the card is written. A failed proof costs nothing.
  • Republishing inside the year — consent, pointers, pages, summary — is free.
  • A listing nobody renews stays in the catalog but is marked unverified until a publish with a funded key renews it.
  • Reads are free for everyone. Bots never pay to look a site up.

What will not list as verified

  • A reachable homepage with no token.
  • A JavaScript app that serves HTML at the well-known path.
  • A publisher asserting “CiteFleet origin” without DNS or the file.
  • A card that says allow_bots while robots.txt Disallow: / for those agents.

Probe the origin before you talk to CiteFleet. After publish, bots discover the site through the public contract. The ops desk is the same pipe CiteFleet calls. A product that lists many client sites uses the publisher API: prove origin, then PUT /v1/publisher/sites/{domain}.