Untitled Protocol

Declare your page as draft, ephemeral, or anonymous

8 followers

Declare your page as draft, ephemeral, or anonymous

8 followers

Web pages have no way to tell bots what they mean. robots.txt says where not to crawl — nothing says "this is a draft" or "don't archive me." Untitled Protocol fixes this with one meta tag or HTTP header. Declare any page as: draft, ephemeral, anonymous, collective, generative, or now. Ships with a live validator, AI suggester, embeddable JS widget, npm package, and WordPress plugin. Open standard, no signup.

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Launch tags:Open Source•Privacy•Developer Tools

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Hunter

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Hi PH 👋 I'm Cristian and I built Untitled Protocol. The problem I kept running into: I'd write a quick draft, a throwaway thought, or a forum reply — and some crawler would index it, an AI would train on it, and suddenly it was cited as if I'd meant it to be permanent. There was no way to say "this was never meant to last." So I spec'd out a tiny protocol: one meta tag () or one HTTP header (X-Untitled: ephemeral). Six states cover almost every case: now (canonical), draft, ephemeral, anonymous, collective, generative. Compliant agents — crawlers, AI pipelines, archivers — can read this and treat the content accordingly. What I shipped alongside the spec: - A validator (paste any URL, see what it declares) - An AI suggest tool (not sure which state? it reads the page and recommends one with reasoning) - untitled.js — a 1kb drop-in script - untitled-meta on npm (React/Vue/Next.js/Astro) - A WordPress plugin - SVG badges for READMEs The spec is MIT licensed and I want this to become a real standard — not my product. If you think there's a gap in the vocabulary, open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer any questions here.

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5mo ago

Forum Threads

p/untitled-protocol

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5mo ago

robots.txt is 30 years old and we never built the next layer

Every major crawler respects robots.txt. It was written in 1994, has no formal standard, and tells bots one thing: where not to go.

That's it. That's the entire vocabulary the web has for communicating with automated agents.

In 2026, those agents are archiving pages, training AI models, extracting authorship, and building knowledge graphs and the only signal a page can send is "don't crawl me at all" or silence.

p/untitled-protocol

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5mo ago

I got tired of AI systems citing my drafts as if I meant them — so I wrote a spec

Last year I published a rough draft, forgot about it, and months later found it cited in an AI-generated summary as if it were my considered opinion. The page had no way to say "this was never finished."

robots.txt has been solving the wrong problem for 30 years. It controls access not intent. There's no standard way to mark a page as draft, temporary, or anonymous before a crawler decides what to do with it.

p/untitled-protocol

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5mo ago

Is there a standard for telling bots "this page was never meant to last"?

I've been working on a tiny protocol for the past few months and wanted to get feedback from this community before I launch.

The problem: robots.txt tells crawlers where not to go. But nothing tells them what the content is draft, temporary, anonymous, AI-generated. A crawler has no way to know the difference between a published article and a throwaway thought.

I spec'd out something called the Untitled Protocol one meta tag or HTTP header with six states: now, draft, ephemeral, anonymous, collective, generative.

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