Writing Studio’s reader

If you saw WritingStudioBot in your server logs, this page explains what it is.

Writing Studio writes and publishes blog posts for the sites its customers connect. To do that, it reads web pages in two situations:

• A customer’s own site. When someone adds their site, Writing Studio reads its home page, sitemap and a sample of its pages to learn what the business does and how it sounds. It reads them again when the customer asks for a refresh of a post.
• Sources for an article. While researching a post, it reads the public pages the post cites (official pricing, help and policy pages), so every fact can be checked and quoted. It may take a screenshot of the line it quotes, shown in the article with the page’s address and the date it was checked.

How it behaves

• It identifies itself in its user agent as WritingStudioBot/1.0 (+https://writingstudio.com/bot). Some requests come from a headless Chrome browser, so the user agent starts like a normal Chrome one and ends with that name.
• It only reads public pages. It never signs in, fills in forms, clicks buttons or solves bot checks. A page that asks for a check is skipped.
• It reads a handful of pages at a time, not your whole site, and doesn’t follow links beyond what it needs.
• It never follows links to private or local network addresses.

Stopping it

To keep Writing Studio from reading your pages as sources, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: WritingStudioBot
Disallow: /

It checks your robots.txt before reading a page and skips anything a rule for WritingStudioBot disallows. You can also block the user agent in your firewall. Either way, nothing else is affected. If a Writing Studio customer adds your site as their own, it reads it because they asked it to.

Questions

Email support@writingstudio.com. To report a security problem, see our security contact.