generated: '2026-08-12' method: probed source: live HTTP probes of people.inc and the brand estate, 2026-08-12 description: | People Inc has no authenticated developer API, so its "agentic access" contract is not an x-agentic-access block over OpenAPI operations — it is a DENY-AND-PRICE policy enforced at the CDN edge over the whole content estate. This artifact records that contract as it was actually observed on the wire, not as it is described in marketing. The headline finding: every People Inc host answers HTTP 402 Payment Required — with a licensing contact in the body — to a request that identifies itself as ClaudeBot. This is a machine-readable commercial signal, and it is the single clearest statement of the company's agent posture anywhere on its public surface. posture: stance: deny-then-license enforcement: edge edge_vendor: Cloudflare robots_policy: comprehensive-ai-denylist paid_crawl_signal: true licensing_contact: contentlicensing@people.inc summary: | Editorial content is closed to AI crawlers by robots.txt AND by an edge rule that returns 402. Discovery metadata (robots.txt, sitemaps, security.txt) stays open to everyone. Sponsored/branded content is explicitly carved OUT of the AI denylist and left crawlable. observed_responses: - probe: HTTP GET with User-Agent "ClaudeBot/1.0 (+https://www.anthropic.com/claude-bot)" hosts: - url: https://www.people.inc/news-awards status: 402 content_type: text/plain bytes: 109 - url: https://people.com/ status: 402 content_type: text/plain bytes: 109 - url: https://www.allrecipes.com/ status: 402 content_type: text/plain bytes: 109 - url: https://www.investopedia.com/ status: 402 content_type: text/plain bytes: 109 body: | Payment Required - If you wish to license content from People Inc, please contact contentlicensing@people.inc response_headers_of_note: server: cloudflare cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000 reading: | 402 is the correct and honest status for this: not "you are forbidden" but "this costs money, here is who to ask". It is a priced boundary, and an agent can act on it. Very few publishers in the catalog return 402 at all; most return 403 or a soft-200 paywall shell that an agent cannot distinguish from content. - probe: HTTP GET with User-Agent "GPTBot/1.2" hosts: - url: https://www.people.inc/news-awards status: 403 content_type: text/html bytes: 680204 reading: | DIFFERENT AGENTS GET DIFFERENT ANSWERS. GPTBot is refused with the generic bot-management interstitial (403 + ~680KB of HTML), not the 402 licensing offer. Only the Anthropic crawler received the priced response in this probe. Whether that reflects a per-vendor rule or a different rule ordering is not determinable from outside; what is recorded here is the observed divergence. - probe: HTTP GET with a desktop Chrome user-agent over curl hosts: - url: https://www.people.inc/news-awards status: 403 content_type: text/html bytes: 680482 - url: https://people.com/ status: 403 content_type: text/html - url: https://people.com/feed status: 403 content_type: text/html reading: | A browser user-agent is NOT sufficient. The edge fingerprints the client beyond the UA string, so every non-browser client is refused on HTML paths regardless of what it claims to be. This is why the RSS feed endpoints recorded in apis.yml cannot be verified from a script. - probe: allowlisted machine paths, any user-agent including ClaudeBot hosts: - url: https://people.com/robots.txt status: 200 content_type: text/plain - url: https://people.com/sitemap.xml status: 200 content_type: text/xml - url: https://people.com/google-news-sitemap.xml status: 200 content_type: text/xml - url: https://people.com/.well-known/security.txt status: 200 content_type: text/plain reading: | The discovery layer is deliberately left open to everyone, including the crawlers the same edge charges for content. People Inc is closing the corpus, not the map. robots_policy: source: https://people.com/robots.txt status: 200 fetched: '2026-08-12' user_agent_directives: 78 license_notice_in_comments: true license_notice: | People Inc. content is made available for your non-commercial use subject to Terms of Use at https://www.people.inc/brands-termsofservice. Use of any crawler to data mine or scrape for any purpose other than directing traffic or serving authorized advertisements is prohibited without prior written permission. Prohibited uses expressly include: (1) text and data mining under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market; (2) development or operation of any AI, ML, or LLM technology, including training, fine-tuning, or retrieval-augmented generation; and (3) creating data sets containing People Inc. content or sharing it. Contact contentlicensing@people.inc. legal_hooks: - EU DSM Directive Art. 4 TDM reservation (machine-readable opt-out) - explicit RAG prohibition - explicit dataset-creation prohibition fully_denied_examples: - Google-Extended - anthropic-ai - Claude-SearchBot - ClaudeBot - Claude-User - Claude-Web - CCBot - cohere-ai - cohere-training-data-crawler - Meta-ExternalAgent - Meta-ExternalFetcher - meta-webindexer - PerplexityBot - Perplexity-User - Bytespider - Applebot-Extended - Amazonbot - AmazonBuyForMe - Amzn-SearchBot - MistralAI-Index - MistralAI-user - DuckAssistBot - Google-CloudVertexBot - FirecrawlAgent - ImagesiftBot - Kagibot - YouBot - iAskBot - Quora-Bot - Webzio-Extended partial_allow: - user_agents: [GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User] rule: 'Disallow: /thmb/' reading: | The OpenAI crawlers are the ONE family not blanket-denied in robots.txt — only the /thmb/ image-thumbnail path is disallowed. People Inc has a commercial relationship with OpenAI; this asymmetry is the robots.txt expression of it. - user_agents: [Pinterest, Pinterestbot] rule: 'Disallow: (empty value — full allow)' - user_agents: [AmazonAdBot] rule: 'Allow: /' sponsored_content_carve_out: rule: | Under the block that denies Google-Extended, anthropic-ai, CCBot, Claude-SearchBot, cohere-ai, Meta-ExternalAgent, meta-webindexer and PerplexityBot with "Disallow: /", two Allow lines reopen specific paths: Allow: */presented/ Allow: */integrated/ reading: | SPONSORED AND BRANDED CONTENT IS EXEMPTED FROM THE AI BLOCK. The paths People Inc keeps open to the AI crawlers it otherwise denies are the paths that carry advertiser-paid content. Editorial is withheld; advertising is offered. This is the clearest instance of agent-facing commercial asymmetry in the media segment of the catalog and it is stated in the provider's own published file, not inferred. corporate_host_policy: source: https://www.people.inc/robots.txt status: 200 fetched: '2026-08-12' note: | The corporate host runs a SEPARATE, differently-authored robots.txt with section-header comments ("AI TRAINING & CONTENT SCRAPING BOTS - BLOCKED"). It includes two wildcard user-agent patterns — "User-agent: *Claude*" and "User-agent: *AI*" — which are NOT valid Robots Exclusion Protocol; RFC 9309 user-agent matching is a prefix match on a token, with no glob support. Those two groups match nothing and enforce nothing. The 402 edge rule is what actually holds this host closed. invalid_directives: - directive: 'User-agent: *Claude*' reason: RFC 9309 does not support glob patterns in user-agent tokens. - directive: 'User-agent: *AI*' reason: RFC 9309 does not support glob patterns in user-agent tokens. consent_signals: aipref: false content_signals: false tdm_reservation_protocol: false web_bot_auth: false http_message_signatures: false robots_txt_tdm_reservation: true note: | The TDM opt-out is asserted in robots.txt PROSE (a comment block naming EU DSM Art. 4), not in any of the machine-parseable consent standards. No /.well-known/ consent document, no Content-Signal header, no AIPREF vocabulary. An agent must read English to learn the policy, or read a 402. agent_readiness_reading: callable_surface: false priced_refusal: true discovery_open: true summary: | There is nothing here for an agent to CALL. What there is, is unusually well-formed refusal: a documented denylist, a priced 402 with a named counterparty, and an open discovery layer. For a publisher that is a coherent posture, and it is more legible to an agent than most publishers who simply return 403 or a soft-200 paywall shell. x-evidence: fetched: '2026-08-12' method: curl with varied User-Agent strings; no credentials used user_agents_tested: - ClaudeBot/1.0 (+https://www.anthropic.com/claude-bot) - GPTBot/1.2 - Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36 - curl/8.7.1 - Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)