Readcast Fetcher
Readcast turns articles into private podcast episodes for the people who use it. If Readcast appears in your logs, one of them asked it to read a page on your site, or to send a notice to your server.
When Readcast Visits
- A person sends Readcast a link to one of your pages, directly or through ChatGPT or Claude, or previews it before making an episode.
- If an article has images, Readcast may download them to describe them in the episode.
- A developer using the Readcast API asks to be told when an episode is ready. Readcast sends a signed notice, a
POSTrequest, to the address they gave.
Readcast doesn't crawl sites, follow links or poll feeds. It requests only the pages and images described here, and their sites' robots.txt, and sends only the notices described here.
How Readcast Identifies Itself
Every request carries one of these User-Agent headers, and each includes Readcast/1.0:
Readcast/1.0 (Article fetcher; +https://app.readcast.io/fetcher)- Articles.
Readcast/1.0 (Source preview; +https://app.readcast.io/fetcher)- An article previewed before an episode is made.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Readcast/1.0; +https://app.readcast.io/fetcher)- Images in an article.
Readcast/1.0 (Completion callback; +https://app.readcast.io/fetcher)- A notice that an episode a developer asked for is ready.
Readcast asks for robots.txt with the user agent of the page or image it is about to fetch.
robots.txt
Readcast reads your site's robots.txt before it fetches a page or an image, and again before each redirect it follows. It follows the group for the Readcast product token, or the * group when there is none. To stop Readcast fetching from your site:
User-agent: Readcast
Disallow: /- Readcast keeps what it read for up to an hour, so a change can take that long to apply.
- If your
robots.txtanswers with a server error, Readcast doesn't fetch from your site until it can read the file. If there is none (a 404), there are no rules. - When a person converts the page they are reading with the Readcast Chrome extension, their browser sends that page, so Readcast fetches nothing and
robots.txtdoesn't apply. The opt-out below does. When the extension can't read the page, it sends the link instead, which is fetched, and checked, like any other.
Blocking Readcast
To block Readcast without editing robots.txt, refuse requests whose User-Agent contains Readcast, for example with a rule on your web server or CDN.
Opting Your Site Out
You can also ask us not to turn your pages into audio at all. We block your domain, including its subdomains, for links sent to Readcast and for pages clipped with the Readcast Chrome extension.
- Use the opt-out form with an email address at your domain. We email you a link, and the block starts as soon as you confirm it.
- Or email copyright@readcast.io with the domain you want excluded, and we confirm by email once it is blocked.
Episodes already made from your site stay private to the people who made them. To have them removed too, tick the box on the form or say so in your email, and we treat your request as a notice.
Contact
For questions about these requests, email support@readcast.io. To report an episode that uses your work without permission, follow our Copyright Policy.