For publishers

The short version

• Informed is an iPhone news app. It writes short stories from several publishers’ reporting, and every story links to the articles it came from.
• We use your headline, your feed’s summary and a link. Where your site allows it, we also read the article to check each point. We never republish it.
• Our crawler, InformedBot, always says who it is and follows your robots.txt.
• You can choose summaries only, or no use at all. You can also ask us to correct or take down a story.

How Informed uses your work

Your feed

Informed reads the RSS and Atom feeds you publish, every 5 to 60 minutes depending on the feed, and asks only for what has changed since its last visit. From each item it keeps the link, the headline, the feed’s own summary, the author, the time and the link to the preview image. We retain these feed records to measure coverage over time. Full article text, where we read it, is held in a separate cache and deleted within 3 days.

How a story is written

Informed groups articles from different publishers about the same event. An AI model then writes a short story from them: a headline, a few key points and a longer report. Quotes, numbers, dates and names are checked against the sources before the story is published. Informed only uses AI providers that are set not to train on what it sends.

Links and credit

Every point in a story shows the publishers it came from, and each name links to the original article. Readers who want the full article go to your site. A shared story opens a web page with the headline, the key points and the same links; the longer report is only in the app.

Reading the full article

For each story, InformedBot reads a small number of article pages (up to 8, one per publisher first) so that every point can be checked against the original reporting. It does not get around paywalls: a page marked as paid-only, or a paywall page with little text, is skipped and the feed summary is used instead.

The text is kept in a private store that readers and the app cannot see, and deleted within 3 days. We never show it to readers or republish it.

With summaries only (see “Your choices”), InformedBot never reads your article pages. Informed uses just your headline, your feed summary and the link. Images from summaries-only sources are not shown.

Images

A story may show the preview image your feed or article offers, loaded from your site, with a credit to you (“Photo: …”). Images from summaries-only sources are not shown. Choosing no use at all also stops your images being used.

Readers’ questions

Readers can ask questions about a story. Answers are written from the story’s sources and, for some questions, from a web search limited to publishers Informed already uses. Answers link to what they draw on. That search is run by our search provider, Exa, not by InformedBot. If you choose no use at all, your site is left out of it.

Your choices

You don’t need to do anything for Informed to credit you and link to you. If you want us to use less of your work, choose one of these:

• Summaries only. Informed keeps linking to your articles and uses your headline and feed summary. It never reads your article pages or shows images from your source.
• No use at all. Informed stops reading your feed. Your articles are no longer used in new stories or in answers to readers’ questions.

To choose either, email support@synapselabs.com.au from an address at your organisation, with the subject “Publisher request”, and tell us your site or feed. We confirm within 2 business days, and the change applies from then on. Stories already published keep their links to you; to have particular stories taken down, see “Correcting or removing a story”.

Using robots.txt

You can also tell InformedBot what to do in your robots.txt. To stop it reading your site at all:

User-agent: InformedBot
Disallow: /

• If robots.txt blocks your feed, InformedBot stops reading it. It checks again once a day, so removing the rule turns the feed back on.
• If robots.txt lets InformedBot read your feed but not your article pages, Informed uses your feed summary only.
• Rules for all bots (“User-agent: *”) apply to InformedBot too.
• InformedBot checks robots.txt before every request, including each redirect.

AI opt-out signals

InformedBot also looks for common machine-readable AI opt-outs and records them. These include a text and data mining reservation (TDMRep), “noai” or “nosnippet” in a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header, and robots.txt rules that stop AI assistants fetching pages for their users. We review recorded opt-outs by hand; they do not change how your feed is used automatically. To be sure of summaries only or no use at all, email us (see “Your choices”).

Correcting or removing a story

If a story in Informed gets your reporting wrong, credits you with something you didn’t report, or uses your work in a way you want removed, email support@synapselabs.com.au with:

• the story’s link (shared stories start with readinformed.com/s/), or its headline and the date you saw it;
• what is wrong, or what you want removed.

We reply within 2 business days. If a story gets your reporting wrong or credits you with something you didn’t report, we aim to correct it or take it down within 24 hours. Taking a story down removes it from the app and from its shared web page, along with its image.

InformedBot at a glance

• User-Agent: InformedBot/0.2 (+https://readinformed.com/bot)
• robots.txt name: InformedBot
• It reads feeds, robots.txt files, a small number of article pages, and the first bytes of a preview image to check its size.
• It uses the same User-Agent for every request and never switches to another one when blocked.
• It runs on shared cloud servers, so it has no fixed IP addresses we can publish. Identify it by its User-Agent.

More detail is on the InformedBot page.

Contact

Opt-outs, corrections, removal requests and any other questions from publishers: support@synapselabs.com.au, subject “Publisher request”. We reply within 2 business days. If you would like to talk about using more of your work, or about a licence, write to the same address.

Informed is made by Synapse Labs Pty Ltd, Australia.