United Airlines Requires Written Permission for AI Agents While Keeping Search Indexing Open

United Airlines' updated terms of use allow search engines to index public pages but require written permission before AI agents can access them. The terms also prohibit using United's data for AI grounding, which is how many AI assistants pull in live web content to answer questions.

Why it matters: Marketers and SEO teams working on AEO and GEO need to track how brands are drawing a line between search crawlers and AI agents, since that line determines whether their content can appear in AI-generated answers.