Licensing intermediary
IAB Tech Lab
In short
IAB Tech Lab's CoMP 1.0, settled in April 2026, names five price types and six ways for a licensed AI system to authenticate, from a user agent to Web Bot Auth, and leaves issuing tokens and moving money to others. Its Spiders and Bots List is sold by subscription; the Agent Registry is free to any registered user.
- Type
- Licensing intermediary
- Homepage
- iabtechlab.com
- In one line
- Ad-industry standards body whose Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) 1.0 define how a licensed AI crawler asks a publisher for content and gets a token, alongside a paid Spiders and Bots List and a free Agent Registry.
- Last read
- 2026-11-05
What IAB Tech Lab does for this layer
From the vendor's own pages
IAB Tech Lab opened CoMP v1 for public comment until 9 Apr 2026 and finalised it on 28 Apr 2026. (iabtechlab.com, dated 2026-04-28) IAB Tech Lab renamed its LLM Content Ingest API initiative to Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) for AI after a workshop with more than 80 executives, including Cloudflare, Fastly and AWS, where TollBit, Dappier, Cloudflare and ProRata presented. (iabtechlab.com, dated 2025-08-19) IAB Tech Lab says CoMP covers the APIs between an AI system and a content owner once the bot holds a license, and states that CoMP is not a bot blocking system, not a licensing marketplace and not a definition of economic models. (iabtechlab.com, dated 2026-04-28) In IAB Tech Lab's CoMP workflow a bot without an agreement is denied and sent to a Licensing URL; with an agreement it sends an access request and its reason and receives an access token for the content. (iabtechlab.com, dated 2026-04-28)
The CoMP 1.0 specification lists six ways an AI system can authenticate: UserAgent, IP range, Token, WebBot Auth, Agent ID from the Tech Lab Registry, and Other. (raw.githubusercontent.com) CoMP 1.0 defines the price types Per-Use, Per-Query, Per-Token, Flat and Tiered Rate, and leaves token issuance, counting and payment out of scope as clearing-house functions. (raw.githubusercontent.com) IAB Tech Lab licenses the CoMP specification under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and only IAB Tech Lab members may take part in the working group. (github.com) IAB Tech Lab's Bot and Crawler Management Guidance tells publishers to verify crawlers beyond the user agent with ASN lookup, reverse DNS and IP reputation, and to review robots.txt and middleware rules quarterly. (raw.githubusercontent.com)
The IAB Tech Lab Spiders and Bots List costs USD 5,000 a year for IAB Tech Lab members, USD 7,500 for IAB associate members and USD 15,000 for non-members, and is updated monthly with the Alliance for Audited Media. (iabtechlab.com) IAB Tech Lab's Agent Registry went live on 3 Mar 2026 and is free to anyone who registers in the Tech Lab Tools Portal. (iabtechlab.com, dated 2026-03-03)
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price model | From | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoMP 1.0 | Request and response objects for a licensed AI system asking a content owner or marketplace for content, with license URL, scope, allowed use, price type and retrieval method. | open specification | USD 0 | 2026-11-05 |
| Spiders and Bots List | Paid list of known robots and valid browsers for filtering invalid traffic in ad measurement. | annual subscription | USD 5000 | 2026-11-05 |
| Agent Registry | Registry of agents in the Tech Lab Tools Portal; CoMP accepts its Agent ID as an authentication method. | free with Tools Portal registration | USD 0 | 2026-11-05 |
Standards
| Standard | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| RFC 9309 (robots.txt) | Supports | The guidance tells publishers to publish a machine-readable robots.txt and update it quarterly. (raw.githubusercontent.com) |
| Web Bot Auth | Supports | CoMP 1.0 lists WebBot Auth (value 3) among accepted AI authentication methods. (raw.githubusercontent.com) |
| Published IP list | Partial | CoMP 1.0 accepts IP range as an authentication method; IAB Tech Lab publishes no crawler IP lists of its own. (raw.githubusercontent.com) |
| Reverse DNS check | Supports | The Bot and Crawler Management Guidance recommends reverse DNS on the IP for major search engines. (raw.githubusercontent.com) |
Our checks
| Check | Result | Method | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage fetch | HTTP 200 | GET with the crawl user agent after a robots.txt check | 2026-11-05 |
What IAB Tech Lab does not do
- IAB Tech Lab does not issue tokens, count usage or move money under CoMP; those clearing-house functions sit with marketplaces or the content owner.
- IAB Tech Lab does not block bots; CoMP assumes the publisher already runs its own blocking strategy.
Reading notes
The RSL 1.0 announcement of 10 December 2025 lists IAB Tech Lab among the supporters of RSL, and CoMP's bot guidance tells publishers to watch RSL developments; see RSL Collective.
Related pages on this site
Sources
- CoMP (Content Monetization Protocols) Initiative
- Announcing the Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) for AI Working Group
- CoMP 1.0 specification (IABTechLab/CoMP on GitHub)
- IABTechLab/CoMP repository
- IAB Tech Lab Bot and Crawler Management Guidance
- IAB Tech Lab Spiders and Bots List
- Navigating the Agentic Frontier: The IAB Tech Lab 2026 Roadmap
Last reviewed 2026-11-05