What is TDMRep, and how does a site reserve data-mining rights?
TDMRep is a W3C community standard for stating that you reserve the right to text-and-data mining of your content. It is a simple signal, a 0 or a 1, sent as a response header, a meta tag or a small file at a well-known address.
What it actually is
In the European Union, text-and-data mining of lawfully accessible content is permitted unless the rights holder reserves it in a way machines can read. TDMRep is that way. A value of 1 says rights are reserved, 0 says they are not, and any other value is an error that readers treat as unset. It can be sent as a response header, written as a meta tag in the page, or published in a tdmrep.json file under /.well-known/, which can give different rules to different parts of a site.
Why it matters
For a publisher that wants to keep its content out of mining, a reservation a machine can read is stronger evidence of intent than a sentence in a terms page. It is also the form the EU rules point to for opting out.
What good looks like
A reservation that states what you mean, in the header, the meta tag or the file, consistent with your robots.txt and your other statements. A site that welcomes mining says so just as plainly.
Being honest about it
It is advanced and optional. We report whether a reservation is declared, not whether it is the right one for you, and nothing here is legal advice. It never fails a page and stays out of the headline score. Whether a given operator honours it is a separate question we cannot see.
Where most sites go wrong
A reservation that contradicts the rest of the site: reserved in a header while the licence terms invite use. Or a meta tag with a value that is neither 0 nor 1, which declares nothing.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, <1% of the sites where it applies (93% of the sites we could read) passed the “Text-and-data-mining reservation (TDMRep)” check.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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