The short version
MaketoBot reads the news feed you publish. That is all it reads. It does not crawl your website, it does not open your articles, and it does not collect anything to train an AI model.
What we do with it: group reports about the same event into one story, write a plain-English summary of what the coverage says, and link readers back to you. Your headline and your article stay yours.
How to recognize it
Every request sends this user-agent string:
MaketoBot/1.0 (+https://maketo.com/bot)We do not publish IP ranges. A user-agent string is not proof of identity, because anyone can copy one. If you need to be certain a request is really ours, email us and we will work it out with you directly.
What it fetches
Your RSS or Atom feed, and nothing else. Not your article pages, not your images, not your homepage. If it is not in the feed you chose to publish, Maketo does not have it.
Feeds are checked about every five minutes, one source at a time, with at least a second between sources. If your feed is slow or returns an error we back off; if it keeps failing we stop asking and check again later.
The pictures on Maketo's news cards are our own drawings, not yours. We used to read an article's page to find its preview image. We stopped: your bandwidth should not pay for our thumbnails.
How to block it
Put this in your robots.txt:
User-agent: MaketoBot
Disallow: /Blocking MaketoBot tells us you want out, and we treat it that way: we stop reading your feed and we stop listing your stories. Stories we already published age out of our feeds and caches over the next several days.
You do not have to use robots.txt. Pick Remove my site from Maketo News on the feedback page and a person will do it for you.
Getting listed
If you publish original Bitcoin reporting and you are not in Maketo yet, we would like to read you. Pick Add my site to Maketo News on the feedback page and send us your feed address. A person reads every one. We do not promise a decision date.
Reaching a person
press@maketo.com takes anything about MaketoBot, about how your stories appear, or about being added or removed. A person reads every message.
For anything else, the feedback page is the fastest route.