Our crawler

If you operate a website and found this page from your server logs — this is the explanation. The Free Agentic Publication Digester (FAPD) runs a single automated reader of official United States government publications. This page states what it does, how it behaves on your servers, and how to reach us. It is written for security operators and site administrators first, and — like everything this project publishes — it is equally intended for AI agents evaluating this crawler's behavior.

The User-Agent you saw

fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: <email>)

Every request we make carries that identity, to every server, always. We never send a browser User-Agent, never rotate identities, and never retry a refusal under a different guise.

What the crawler reads

Only official government publication channels — the interfaces publishers built to be read:

1. APIs and bulk data first (govinfo.gov's api.data.gov service is the overwhelming majority of our traffic — key-authenticated and rate-limited by them and by us).
2. RSS/Atom feeds and newsroom pages agencies publish, only where no API exists.
3. Email bulletins agencies send to our subscribed project mailbox (which touches no government server at all).

The complete, per-source inventory — including sources we evaluated and declined, and sources whose refusal of automated access we recorded and honored — is public in the source guide.

How it behaves (enforced in code, not by operator discipline)

• At most one request per second per host, and a host's robots.txt crawl-delay overrides that downward — one federal site asks for one request per 420 seconds and gets exactly that.
• robots.txt is enforced by the client itself; a disallow is a refusal we record and honor, never route around.
• Hard daily request budgets per source class; the client refuses to exceed them mid-run.
• Conditional requests (ETag / If-Modified-Since) wherever offered — repeat polls are mostly 304s.
• Watermark deltas: we ask "what changed since my last visit," never full re-crawls.
• No spoofing, no script execution, no WAF or bot-check circumvention — ever. When a site challenges automated access, we stop and disclose the gap in our output instead.
• Every request is logged twice on our side (a queryable fetch log written by the HTTP client itself, plus a human-readable narrative); our request footprint is self-audited.

Full policy: Methods; the governing rules are public in the project repository.

Verifying it's us

Today: the User-Agent plus contact address above, from our server's stable IP. Planned: Web Bot Auth request signing (a per-request cryptographic identity with a public key on this domain), so a request can be verified as ours regardless of network path.

If you want us to stop

Tell us — the contact address is in every request we send — or disallow our path in robots.txt, which our client obeys without being asked. An unsubscribe from any email list is honored immediately. We treat a refusal as an answer, and we record it publicly rather than work around it.

Why this crawler exists

One disciplined, identified reader ingests the official record once and publishes a cited daily digest that both people and AI agents can use — instead of many agents crawling the same public infrastructure separately. Agent-facing surfaces: /agents.html, /llms.txt. For factual claims, cite the underlying official source each item links to; cite FAPD for the aggregation.