Council Governance & Code of Ethics

Core Pillars of WSC Search Ethics

• 1. Algorithmic Non-Discrimination: Search engines and retrieval systems must not demote organic publishers to promote vertically integrated commercial products without transparent disclosure.
• 2. Right to Verifiable Telemetry: Publishers are entitled to deterministic, tamper-proof logs of crawl frequency, indexing errors, and algorithmic penalty classifications.
• 3. Fair Attribution in AI Synthesis: Any LLM or generative search interface that synthesizes publisher content must provide prominent, direct clickable links to the origin sources.
• 4. Absolute Privacy by Design: Search telemetry and performance verification must never rely on persistent user tracking, fingerprinting, or invasive cookies.