Information for publishers

If you found unfamiliar automated requests in your logs and followed the link in the User-Agent, this page is for you.

Who we are

Veriq reads publishers' RSS and Atom feeds and writes short briefings for its subscribers.

Veriq is in development and is not yet open to the public. Our request volume today is small and comes mostly from testing. If you are trying to work out whether we are worth worrying about: we are one small project, we identified ourselves on purpose, and everything you need to stop us is further down this page.

What we request

• Your RSS or Atom feed.
• Your robots.txt.
• Your homepage, once, only when we are trying to discover where your feed is.

We do not crawl article pages, we do not execute JavaScript, and we do not follow links out of your feed to gather more of your site.

What we do with it, and why

We write a short brief for readers who asked to follow a topic, and every brief links to your article.

The point is to send that reader to you. A brief is deliberately short — enough for someone to recognise that the story matters to them, and not enough to be a substitute for reading it. We would rather be the reason a reader arrives on your site than the reason they felt no need to.

To be straight with you: we are pre-launch, so the traffic we send you today is negligible. That is a statement of how the product is designed, not a benefit we have already delivered. We would rather tell you that now than have you find out after taking our word for something.

Concretely, that means:

• Every brief credits your publication by name and links to the original article.
• We never reproduce an article in full, and we do not republish your text.
• We do not present your reporting as ours.
• We do not use your content to train any machine learning model.
• We do not sell or redistribute your feed data.

If you want to see the traffic we actually send you, email us and we will tell you exactly what to look for in your own analytics. We would rather you check than take our word for it.

How to identify us

Our requests carry a User-Agent beginning with Veriq/:

Veriq/1.0 (+https://getveriq.com/bot)

Matching on the string Veriq will catch all of our traffic, including any future version.

We are moving our requests to a dedicated address that reverse-resolves to fetch.getveriq.com. Until that is finished, the User-Agent is the reliable way to identify us.

How we try to behave

• We read and obey robots.txt, including Crawl-delay.
• We use conditional requests (If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since) so that when nothing has changed you only have to send us a 304.
• We never render your pages, never submit forms, and never attempt to work around a block.

Two things we are still building, stated plainly rather than claimed: automatic back-off when you return 429 or 503 with a Retry-After, and a polling schedule matched to how often each feed actually publishes rather than a fixed interval. If we are asking too often today, that is the reason — please tell us and we will fix it for your site immediately.

We would much rather hear from you than be blocked.

How to block us

Add this to your robots.txt and we will stop:

User-agent: Veriq
Disallow: /

To keep us out of one path only:

User-agent: Veriq
Disallow: /path-you-want-private/

We honour this without argument and without asking why. If you would prefer a direct block at your edge or CDN, email us and we will confirm the details you need.

Contact

A person reads bot@getveriq.com. Removal and rate-limit requests are acted on, not filed.