For site owners
This page walks through how to add a button that lets readers subscribe with one click, how freefeed fetches your site, and what to do if you’d like to stop being listed.
Make it easy for readers to subscribe
Add a “Subscribe on freefeed” button to your site, and readers can register your feed with a single click. We also provide a subscriber-count badge — both are set up by pasting a few lines of HTML. Rather than the exact number, the subscriber count is shown as a rounded value: fewer than 10, 10+, 20+, 50+, 100+, and so on.
Check if your site is already listed
Enter a domain, and you’ll see the list of feeds freefeed is fetching from that site.
Example: example.com
What freefeed includes and doesn’t include
- Article bodies
- Not included. Public pages show only titles and links, up to the ten most recent articles.
- Articles from sites that don’t publish RSS or Atom
- Included. From the URL of a page listing your articles, freefeed picks up the headlines and assembles them into a feed (a pseudo-feed). This doesn’t appear on the list page you get from the “Check if your site is already listed” lookup, though.
- Sites that requested removal
- Not included. They’re removed from both the public page and the list you get from the domain lookup.
- Feeds we can no longer fetch
- Not included. If fetching keeps failing over a long period, the feed is removed from the public page.
- Showing up in search engines
- Feeds that were just added and don’t have many articles yet have a page, but it won’t show up in search results. Once enough articles accumulate, it starts appearing in search results automatically.
About our crawler
freefeed’s crawler (FreeFeedBot/1.0) regularly fetches ordinary RSS/Atom feeds. It opens at most two concurrent connections to the same host, with at least one second between requests. Fetch intervals adapt automatically between 5 minutes and 24 hours depending on how often your site updates, and it uses conditional GET (If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since), so the load when nothing has changed is minimal.
If you want to opt out
If you’d like to stop being listed, please submit the removal request form. Once we verify domain ownership, it’s processed automatically. If you want to stop us from fetching your RSS/Atom feed at all, don’t use the form — contact us at support@freefeed.app instead.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I stop the ordinary RSS/Atom fetch using robots.txt?
- No. Many sites disallow their subscription feed in robots.txt, and honouring that would break the subscription for readers. If you want to stop the fetch, get in touch from “If you want to opt out” above. Building articles from a site that doesn’t publish a feed (a pseudo-feed) does stop automatically once you add a Disallow for it in robots.txt.
- How are sites that keep returning errors handled?
- If a site returns 429 or 503, we widen the fetch interval step by step. If the errors keep happening, we automatically stop fetching that site.
- What changes if I support WebSub (PubSubHubbub)?
- The ordinary fetch checks at a fixed interval whether or not there’s anything new. If you support a WebSub hub, freefeed gets a notification the moment something’s published, so new articles show up without waiting for the next fetch interval. Many blogging services, including WordPress, support this by default.
- Does the subscriber-count badge show the exact number of people?
- No. It shows a rounded value: fewer than 10, 10+, 20+, 50+, 100+, and so on. This is so a small number can’t be used to identify individual subscribers.
- Can anyone submit a removal request?
- No. We verify domain ownership first, using a DNS TXT record, a .well-known file, or robots.txt, and only then process the request automatically. This is to prevent malicious removal requests from third parties.
- If I request removal from the public page, what happens to readers who already subscribed?
- Their subscriptions continue. Removal from the public page (/feed/…) alone doesn’t stop fetching the RSS/Atom feed or delivering it to readers who already subscribed. If you want to stop the fetch itself, contact us by email instead of using the form.