MULHOUSE, France — ADN Contents relaunched Lycos.fr on September 21, 2026, bringing the legacy internet portal back online within days of acquiring the domain, founder Benjamin Romei said.
The rapid revival involved deploying a functional version of the platform in a single afternoon, with a search and news portal attracting thousands of registrations by the evening of the acquisition date, Romei said.
The technical architecture for the revitalized Lycos.fr platform uses Astro, a web framework, hosted on Cloudflare Workers. Other essential services, including databases, caching, and email, are also integrated within the Cloudflare ecosystem, Romei told French technology publication Begeek.
For audience measurement, Lycos.fr uses Plausible, an analytics solution that offers cookie-less and GDPR-compliant data collection, opting against Google Analytics 4, ADN Contents reported.
A strategic decision was made regarding content indexing: paid ‘Enterprise’ pages on Lycos.fr are indexed by Google and made accessible to AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. Conversely, free personal pages are deliberately set to be noindexed, Romei explained to Abondance.
The platform has also implemented moderation systems to manage user-generated content. Lycos.fr employs TypeSafe AI’s Jev to combat spam and filter inappropriate page names, blocking approximately 300 names to date, ADN Contents stated.
Victor Lerat, a core contributor, played a significant role in the platform’s development, according to Romei.
The relaunch marks a new chapter for Lycos.fr, focusing on a lean, privacy-conscious operation while strategically managing its content visibility for both human users and artificial intelligence systems.
Source: Abondance
