My RSL or Content Signals declaration isn't being detected — troubleshooting

Both RSL and Content Signals rely on the declaration being served exactly where and how CrawlPact — and any AI crawler checking it — expects to find it.

RSL: “No RSL license element was found”

CrawlPact fetches /.well-known/rsl.xml and specifically looks for a <license element in the response body. Common causes:

• The file is published at a different path. It must be exactly /.well-known/rsl.xml at your domain root.
• The response is a redirect or error page rather than the actual XML content. Confirm /.well-known/rsl.xml returns a normal 200 response with your XML directly, not a redirect to a login page or a generic 404 page that happens to return status 200.
• The XML is present but doesn’t contain a <license> element — CrawlPact’s reader specifically requires this element to consider the declaration “discovered.”

Content Signals: “No Content-Signal response header was present”

CrawlPact checks the Content-Signal HTTP response header on your homepage request specifically. Common causes:

• The header is set on some paths but not the homepage. CrawlPact currently checks the homepage response only.
• The header is being stripped by a CDN, proxy, or caching layer between your origin server and the internet. Test with a direct curl -I request against your live domain to confirm the header is actually present in the response CrawlPact (and any external crawler) would see.
• The header name or key=value syntax has a typo — CrawlPact parses comma-separated key=value pairs; a value it doesn’t recognise as yes or no is reported as unknown rather than silently ignored.

Verify

Run CrawlPact’s RSL validator or Content Signals checker after making a change — both re-fetch live on each scan.