Legal and compliance
What is Acceptable use policy?
The rules governing what visitors may do on or with a site — no scraping, no attempts to breach security, no unlawful content, no misuse of forms. It gives you a stated basis for blocking abuse rather than acting arbitrarily.
Also called: AUP · fair use policy
What it typically prohibits
- Automated scraping or bulk downloading outside published crawler rules
- Attempting to access accounts, data or systems without authorisation
- Submitting unlawful, defamatory or infringing content through any form
- Using contact forms or comments for unsolicited marketing
- Reverse engineering, or circumventing rate limits and access controls
How it relates to robots.txt
robots.txt is a request that well-behaved crawlers honour voluntarily; an acceptable use policy is a contractual term. Neither is a technical control, and neither stops a determined actor — rate limiting and authentication do that. The policy establishes that the behaviour was not permitted.
Keep it enforceable
Prohibit things you would actually act on. A policy banning behaviour you tolerate daily is evidence that the document is decorative, which weakens the clauses you do care about.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. robots.txt in 2026, including every AI crawler worth naming covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.