Publisher Data & Crawler Policy

Version: 2026-09-08Effective: September 8, 2026Crawler: ZeekerBot

This policy governs publisher material Zeeker encounters outside an accepted Zeeker publisher account—for example through a public RSS feed, a link a user shares, public metadata, a licensed source, or an open-web discovery provider.

Public does not mean ownerless. A public URL, robots permission, RSS feed, or user-submitted link does not transfer copyright or authorize every reuse. Zeeker distinguishes discovery from commercial reuse, records source rights, and honors verified restrictions and applicable machine-readable reservations.

1. What Zeeker may encounter

Depending on source and permission, Zeeker may process:

• publisher and domain name, favicon, public contact and rights information;
• article or page URL, canonical URL, title, publication/update date, language, category, and public byline;
• publisher-supplied description, a genuinely short contextual snippet, or structured metadata;
• an article image URL supplied in RSS, Open Graph, or comparable public metadata, which Zeeker may remotely display as a linked preview unless the publisher or its rights signals explicitly restrict that image use;
• feed metadata, license notices, embargo, attribution, robots, TDM, cache, and AI-use signals; and
• technical fetch results needed to prevent broken, unsafe, paywalled, stale, or misleading links.

Zeeker does not treat full article bodies, photographs, video, or databases as freely reusable merely because they are accessible online.

2. Purposes and legal basis

Publisher data may be used to:

• resolve and display a user-shared link;
• help people discover and navigate to the original publisher;
• provide accurate attribution, freshness, and source context;
• detect broken links, spam, impersonation, manipulation, and safety risks;
• operate a publisher-authorized feed, embed, import, license, or API;
• maintain a rights/provenance ledger and honor opt-outs; and
• create summaries, retrieval, analytics, models, datasets, or licensed products only when the recorded license, permission, or applicable legal exception covers that use.

Depending on jurisdiction and use, the basis may be publisher contract or consent, a direct license, legitimate interests balanced against rights, or a specific statutory exception. Zeeker does not rely on a text-and-data-mining exception where rights are effectively reserved and the exception no longer applies.

3. Source rights ledger

Each governed source should have a durable record of:

• exact source, owner or operator, acquisition method, and review date;
• countries and service uses covered;
• license, terms URL/version, statutory exception, or other permission relied upon;
• whether commercial use, metadata, snippets, remote media, cache, RAG/inference, training, analytics, or licensing is allowed;
• required attribution, link, author, notice, payment, embargo, and downstream restrictions;
• robots, TDM, X-Robots-Tag, HTML metadata, trust or content signals observed;
• expiration, re-review, correction, takedown contact, and deletion duties; and
• case history, verification, effective date, purge status, and downstream notification.

Unknown or prohibited commercial-reuse fields fail closed for article text, caching, model, dataset, and other substantive reuse. A feed used only to discover and link a story is not automatically cleared for those uses.

For a limited article-preview image, Zeeker applies a separate opt-out rule. Zeeker may remotely display the exact HTTPS image URL that a publisher supplies in RSS, Open Graph, or comparable public metadata, together with the publisher name and a direct link to the article, unless the source ledger, resource response, machine-readable signal, or a verified publisher request explicitly blocks that image use. Zeeker does not treat the image URL as a transfer of ownership or a general copyright license and does not store or proxy the image under this rule. If the image is absent, broken, insecure, or restricted, Zeeker may instead show a source-identification banner containing the publisher name, domain, and public favicon or site mark. That banner is descriptive attribution and does not imply publisher sponsorship or endorsement.

4. Fetching rules

Zeeker’s named crawler identifies itself as:

ZeekerBot/1.0 (+https://legal.zeeker.com/publisher-data)

Zeeker does not intentionally impersonate a consumer browser to defeat publisher controls. It does not intentionally bypass paywalls, login requirements, CAPTCHAs, IP blocks, technical access controls, or contractual API restrictions.

Zeeker evaluates, as technically applicable:

• robots.txt rules for ZeekerBot and applicable wildcard rules;
• X-Robots-Tag and HTML robots directives such as noindex, noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex, noai, or noimageai;
• tdm-reservation and tdm-policy expressed in HTTP, HTML, or tdmrep.json;
• publisher license, rights, and attribution metadata;
• site-wide trust or content signals such as datatrainingallowed=no; and
• a verified instruction recorded through Zeeker’s Publisher Request workflow.

Robots rules are access preferences, not a copyright license. Conversely, an allowed fetch does not override a separate rights reservation. A direct written license may define agreed use despite a generic signal, but the source ledger must record that scope.

5. Attribution and presentation

Where Zeeker displays publisher-derived metadata, it should:

• identify the publisher and link directly to the original page;
• avoid substituting for the article or misleading users about source;
• use only the amount allowed by the applicable license or law;
• preserve required author, copyright, license, and sponsored-content notices;
• display an exact HTTPS RSS/Open Graph article image as a limited remote preview when no explicit image-use restriction is recorded, keep the preview linked to the original article, identify the publisher, and avoid storing or proxying it unless separately cleared;
• use a publisher-name, domain, and public favicon/site-mark banner when an article image is absent, broken, insecure, or explicitly restricted;
• remove stale, corrected, retracted, embargoed, or broken records as appropriate; and
• avoid presenting machine-generated summaries as publisher-written text.

6. Publisher controls

A verified publisher or rights owner may separately request that Zeeker:

• stop crawling or fetching a domain or URL pattern;
• stop indexing or discovery;
• remove or correct title, byline, attribution, snippet, metadata, or link;
• stop remote images/thumbnails;
• remove a cache or stored copy;
• exclude material from AI answers, retrieval/grounding, analytics, training, evaluation, datasets, or downstream licensing;
• preserve or apply a license with specified conditions; or
• notify controlled downstream recipients of a correction or deletion.

Submit a publisher request. Identify the affected uses and include the domain and exact URLs. Zeeker will provide a case reference.

7. Verification and timing

To protect publishers from fraudulent removal, Zeeker may verify authority through a domain email, DNS TXT record, .well-known token, account ownership, signed statement, or proportionate documentation. Do not upload government ID through the public form.

We acknowledge the request and prioritize credible ongoing infringement, intimate imagery, child safety, security, and legally time-sensitive notices. Once verified and approved, Zeeker applies the restriction to the source registry and collection path, identifies affected active records, and performs deletion, correction, suppression, or downstream notice according to the case. The automated safeguard currently enforces either a domain-wide resource restriction or a domain-wide image-only restriction, so it may be broader than the requested use or URL set. We will communicate the restriction actually applied and its effective date.

A general opt-out does not necessarily require removal of facts, individual words, genuine hyperlinks, records Zeeker must preserve, or uses independently authorized by law. We will explain an exception and provide an appeal path.

8. Personal data obtained indirectly

For GDPR-style Article 14 transparency, data categories may include public professional name/byline, publisher affiliation, article metadata, source URL, public rights contact, and attribution. Sources are the publisher page or feed, user-shared link, license provider, or open-web discovery service.

Purposes, legal bases, recipients, transfers, retention, and rights are described here and in the Privacy Policy. Public-source records are retained while the link/attribution purpose and rights basis remain valid, then deleted or de-identified, subject to legal holds. Individuals may access, correct, delete, restrict, or object through the Request Center.

9. Appeals and disputes

If Zeeker rejects or narrows a publisher request, the decision will identify the reason where possible. Reply with the case reference and supporting rights or authority. A person not involved in the initial decision will review an eligible appeal.

10. Important limitation

An opt-out form does not retroactively legalize unauthorized collection. Zeeker must have a valid source-by-source basis before the relevant use. This policy is an operational commitment, not a claim that every publicly accessible item may lawfully be used.

Submit a publisher request

Submit this request through Contact Zeeker The dedicated form creates a legal-case reference and keeps the required privacy, publisher, copyright, safety, or official-request declarations.

Open legal request form