FocalBot

The crawler behind Focal, a news-briefing app. If you found this page from your server logs, here's exactly who we are and how to control what we fetch.

User-agent

FocalBot identifies itself honestly. You'll see this string in your access logs:

The link in the user-agent points back to this page so you can always trace it to a real operator.

What it fetches, and why

• Your RSS/Atom feed - the primary request. We parse the feed to discover new articles.
• The article page itself, in two narrow cases: to read a clean copy of the article body when the feed summary is too short to summarize fairly, and to pull the lead image (og:image) for the brief's thumbnail. We do not crawl your whole site, follow links beyond the article, or archive full text.

How often

We poll feeds on a fixed schedule - at most roughly once every six hours (about four times a day). We cap how many items we take per feed each run and dedupe aggressively, so we don't re-fetch the same article. We fetch from cloud infrastructure, identifying as FocalBot the whole time.

Attribution

Every brief credits and links back to the original sources. Focal is built to send readers to your reporting, not to replace it - briefs are short, source-attributed, and link out. If you publish, FocalBot is a referral path, not a substitute.

Contact

Questions, rate-limit requests, or partnership ideas: hello@focal.fyi. A human reads it.