Authority scope

Authority scope defines what a source is allowed to settle.

The official Better Robots.txt site has strong authority over its own product identity, published documentation, policy signals and non-goals. It does not have unlimited authority over reality outside the site.

Four authority regimes

Better Robots.txt uses four proposed regimes:

1. First-party product scope for identity, documentation and declared policy.
2. Audit report scope for /check reports tied to a target and time.
3. Runtime evidence scope for crawler behavior that requires logs, direct fetches, headers or comparable evidence.
4. Independent evaluation scope for reviews, criticism, comparison and reputation.

Practical example

If the question is “what does Better Robots.txt claim to do?”, the official site is primary.

If the question is “did GPTBot obey this policy?”, the official site is not enough. The answer needs live evidence or a legitimate non-response.

Machine-readable matrix

The matrix is published at /authority-scope-matrix.json.