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Overview

Unpublish stops serving the Agent Pages you name. Each path is added to the site’s Ignore List, so it stays unpublished: later crawls, sitemap checks and page selections don’t bring it back. Its copy is then removed from the edge, within minutes or, with immediate: true, before the response. Use it from your CMS when a page is taken down, or when an Agent Page must stop being served right away. Unpublish acts on the Agent Page only. If the path also has curated (Adaptive) content, agents keep receiving that version after the unpublish, and the response doesn’t report it. Remove it with the AXP Unpublish API. See Which API do I need?.

What happens to a path

  1. The path is added to the site’s Ignore List under Configure → Universal Optimizations, as a single page (its subpages are not affected).
  2. The Agent Page is archived. On a page-by-page setup, the page is also no longer marked Serve on Agent Pages, so it stops counting against your Agent Pages budget.
  3. Its copy is deleted from the edge. Without immediate, a background job does this within minutes of the response.
The API never changes a rule you set in the dashboard. If the path is itself an entry you added to the Priority List in the dashboard, either a page entry or a prefix entry, it returns conflict and nothing is written. Only that exact path conflicts: a page under a prefix entry (/blog/post under /blog) can still be unpublished, because the Ignore List wins over the Priority List. Unpublishing doesn’t change the site’s Agent Pages settings published to the edge, and doesn’t touch other pages. Curated (Adaptive) content at the same path keeps serving, and the response doesn’t report it.

How long a copy can still be served

Once its copy is deleted, the edge stops serving the Agent Page within about 60 seconds. A cache in front of the edge can still hold a copy it already served to an AI agent, and serves it until it expires: Without immediate, add the few minutes the background job takes to delete the copy. Scrunch doesn’t purge your CDN cache; purge the URL yourself if it can’t wait.

Publishing the page again

An unpublished path stays off until you remove it from the Ignore List under Configure → Universal Optimizations. On a page-by-page setup, then select Serve on Agent Pages for it again in the Site Optimization Pages table. Selecting it while the path is still on the Ignore List doesn’t serve it.

Endpoint

The endpoint requires a bearer token with the optimize scope. See Authentication. Use the site ID that List Sites reports with agent_pages_active: true; see Find your site ID.

Request

Paths follow the same rules as Force Refresh: send the public URL path, site-relative, up to 2,048 characters. Paths are lowercased, the trailing slash and query string are dropped, and duplicates are merged. / is the homepage. See Path rules.

Response

The endpoint returns 200 OK with one result per requested path, in request order, and the brand’s remaining unpublish quota.

Outcome values

Only unpublished and already_unpublished paths count toward the quota, and only when the path was not already on the Ignore List. conflict paths never do.

Edge results

Reported only with immediate: true, for every requested path whose Agent Page is no longer served but whose copy was still at the edge, whatever its outcome. That includes an already_unpublished path whose copy an earlier call left behind, so an immediate retry cleans it up. null means there was no copy to delete. A page this call left serving (for example conflict, cooldown or rate_limited on a live page) is never deleted and reports null. For an unpublished path, the page stays unpublished whatever edge says: it is on the Ignore List and won’t be republished.

Limits

The quotas are shared by all of a brand’s sites and are separate from the Force Refresh quotas. For a bulk cleanup, use the Ignore List in the dashboard, which also accepts a CSV upload.

Example: take a page down right away

Response:

Errors

A path that is in cooldown, not found, or in conflict doesn’t cause an error: the request still returns 200 with those outcomes. A failed edge delete doesn’t either: those paths report edge: "failed".

Best practices

  • Retry safely. Re-sending a path returns already_unpublished and changes nothing on the Ignore List. With immediate: true, a retry also deletes any edge copy still left from the earlier call and reports it in edge.
  • Use immediate when it matters. It makes the request slower, so leave it off for routine takedowns; the background job removes the copy within minutes.
  • Send one request at a time per brand. A request sent while another unpublish for the brand is in progress gets 429 with Retry-After: 1. Batch paths into one request (up to 100).
  • Remove curated content too. If the dashboard shows an edited or deployed version at the path, unpublish it with the AXP Unpublish API as well, or agents keep receiving it after the Agent Pages unpublish.