Sites Using NoArchive or NoCache Lose Microsoft's AI Opt-Out on March 1, 2027 Unless They Switch
TLDR
Sites using NoArchive or NoCache will lose their Microsoft AI opt-out on March 1, 2027 unless they switch, and Google's token will also cover Gemini grounding.
What this means for your site
- Status
- Policy change
- Platform
- Bing, Google Search
- Affects
- NoArchive directive, NoCache directive, Gemini grounding
- Who
- Sites using NoArchive or NoCache
- Effective
- March 1, 2027
- Action needed
- Switch away from NoArchive or NoCache to keep the Microsoft AI opt-out.
Optimixed Overview
Optimixed's original report on this story.
PPC Land reports that sites using NoArchive or NoCache will lose their Microsoft AI opt-out on March 1, 2027 unless they switch. At Google, the same token will also cover Gemini grounding.
How we got here
- Oct 31Google and Bing will honor a shared robots.txt signal to block AI training
Google and Bing said they will honor a shared robots.txt signal that blocks AI training, and a study put AI Overviews click-through at 0.9%.
- Oct 23Meta pushes back AI crawling opt-out deadline to November 20 following publisher backlash
Meta extended the deadline for publishers to opt out of AI model training from an earlier date to November 20.
- Oct 21Google Expands Content Exclusion Options in Search, Adds AI Training Control
Google expanded its list of content exclusion methods to seven, adding Search Console AI controls alongside existing snippet and indexing rules.
- Sep 15Cloudflare's Disallow AI Training feature allows sites to block AI scrapers without excluding Googlebot
Cloudflare introduced a Disallow AI Training option that blocks AI crawlers from training data while preserving access for Googlebot and other search engines.