What is TDMRep, and how does a site reserve data-mining rights?
TDMRep is a W3C community standard for stating that you reserve the right to text-and-data mining of your content. It is a simple signal, a 0 or a 1, sent as a response header, a meta tag or a small file at a well-known address.
What it actually is
In the European Union, text-and-data mining of lawfully accessible content is permitted unless the rights holder reserves it in a way machines can read. TDMRep is that way. A value of 1 says rights are reserved, 0 says they are not, and any other value is an error that readers treat as unset. It can be sent as a response header, written as a meta tag in the page, or published in a tdmrep.json file under /.well-known/, which can give different rules to different parts of a site.
Why it matters
For a publisher that wants to keep its content out of mining, a reservation a machine can read is stronger evidence of intent than a sentence in a terms page. It is also the form the EU rules point to for opting out.
What good looks like
A reservation that states what you mean, in the header, the meta tag or the file, consistent with your robots.txt and your other statements. A site that welcomes mining says so just as plainly.
Being honest about it
It is advanced and optional. We report whether a reservation is declared, not whether it is the right one for you, and nothing here is legal advice. It never fails a page and stays out of the headline score. Whether a given operator honours it is a separate question we cannot see.
Where most sites go wrong
A reservation that contradicts the rest of the site: reserved in a header while the licence terms invite use. Or a meta tag with a value that is neither 0 nor 1, which declares nothing.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, <1% of the sites where it applies (88% of the sites we could read) passed the “Text-and-data-mining reservation (TDMRep)” check.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it stayed at 0%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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