Access Guidance

accessGuidance is optional. If you omit it, OpenNav does not create or edit robots.txt for Content Signals.

Use it when you want the generated static output to include machine-readable content-use preferences in robots.txt. Content Signals are a convention for expressing preferences about how crawlers use content after they access it; see Content Signals for the policy text and generator.

When to use it

Configure access guidance when you want to publish an explicit preference for search indexing, real-time AI input use, or AI training while keeping the site publicly crawlable.

This is a good fit for docs, blogs, marketing sites, and public reference content where you want normal discovery to keep working, but you still want robots.txt to state how automated systems should use the content.

When to omit it

Omit accessGuidance when you do not want OpenNav to manage any part of robots.txt, when your team already owns a hand-written Content Signals policy, or when you have not decided what preferences to publish.

Content Signals are not a technical block against scraping. They express site owner preferences, and some crawlers may ignore them. Use crawler controls, WAF rules, bot management, authentication, or paywalling when you need enforcement instead of preference signaling.

interface OpenNavAccessGuidanceOptions {
  readonly contentSignals?: {
    readonly search?: "allow" | "disallow";
    readonly aiInput?: "allow" | "disallow";
    readonly aiTrain?: "allow" | "disallow";
  };
}

contentSignals

Optional. Content-use preferences OpenNav writes into robots.txt.

The configured fields become one Content-signal directive.

search

Writes search=yes for "allow" or search=no for "disallow". Use this field for search indexing and search snippets.

aiInput

Writes ai-input=yes for "allow" or ai-input=no for "disallow". Use this field for real-time AI input use, such as grounding or retrieval.

aiTrain

Writes ai-train=yes for "allow" or ai-train=no for "disallow". Use this field for model training or fine-tuning use.

Example configuration:

accessGuidance: {
  contentSignals: {
    search: "allow",
    aiInput: "allow",
    aiTrain: "disallow"
  }
}

With the example above, OpenNav writes:

Content-signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=no

OpenNav manages only the block between # Begin OpenNav AI and # End OpenNav AI. If robots.txt already contains unmanaged Content Signals, OpenNav returns a warning instead of changing that file.