Web Bot Auth(webbotauth)

• IETF124: Tue 04 Nov 2025 14:30 - Place du Canada
• BoF request
• Potentially of interest because: potentially more control by server operators on what bots are given access to their data.
• keywords: AI, search

Web bots crawl the world wilde web constantly and servers of webcontent and are interested in identifying robotic web agents using cryptographic mechanism to identify robots. Which will go beyond heuristics based on their source IP address, their names - as queried in the reverse DNS, or based on the user-agent claims made by the bots in the header.

The protagonists are working on the mailing list to define a draft charter.