LLM-Assisted Robots.txt Reasoning - Dynamic Crawl Policies Per Use Case

An earlier version of this article stated that the Robots Exclusion Protocol was never standardized as an IETF RFC and that Google's 2019 proposal was withdrawn. That was incorrect: the protocol was published as RFC 9309, an IETF Standards Track document, in September 2022. The "Background" section below has been corrected.
Robots.txt has long been the core mechanism for expressing crawl preferences and constraints on the web. Yet, the file format is intentionally simple and underspecified, while real-world websites exhibit complex, context-dependent expectations around crawling, scraping, and automated interaction. In parallel, large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI workflows are transforming how scraping systems reason about and adapt to such expectations.
