Our engine is built to index at a friendly rate. We'd rather score URLs and websites slowly than risk affecting performance for real customers.

We typically won't retrieve more than one URL per second, although for larger sites our system will attempt to increase that rate tentatively and monitor for any signs of impact on performance.

User-Agent

Our user agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 Readable/1.1.4".

Please note that the version number following "Readable/" will change periodically and the version number shown here may not be current.

Many websites will serve different versions of text to search engine spiders, and some will block access to anything they don't recognise. Since our job is to measure the readability of the page a typical user sees, we do our best to make sure that's what we are seeing.

JavaScript

Our engine does not support pages rendered with JavaScript at the moment, though that is something we are working on and hope to support soon.

robots.txt

We respect instructions from the robots.txt file.

If you want to specifically exclude anything from being indexed by the Readable engine, you can use the user-agent "ReadableBot". 

Dave Child

Dave is the founder of Readable and has been building websites since the early 90s. He’s one of those fortunate people who gets to do what he loves for a living.