The RatingsReference bot

What the bot is

RatingsReference operates one crawler. It fetches the public pages and feeds listed in the site's source registry (network press offices, trade outlets, league schedule pages) to read audience figures that those sources have already published, and it records where each figure came from.

How it identifies itself

• User-Agent: `RatingsReference/0.1 (+https://ratingsreference.com; US sports-telecast audience archive; not a browser)`
• Web Bot Auth: every request carries an HTTP Message Signature (RFC 9421, Ed25519). The `Signature-Agent` header points to this site's key directory at `https://ratingsreference.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory`.
• Operator: HeyTC, LLC, the operator of RatingsReference.com.
• The bot never presents a browser User-Agent.

What it does with content

• Reads press releases, articles, RSS feeds and schedule pages.
• Extracts published audience figures and stores each with its source URL, publication date and a verbatim excerpt for attribution.
• Does not train models on fetched content, does not republish articles, and does not act on behalf of a user.
• Public press-released figures only. It never ingests licensed data.

How it behaves

• Fetches at most one page per source at a time with a pause between requests.
• Honors `robots.txt` and conditional requests (`ETag`, `Last-Modified`).
• Runs from Cloudflare Workers on a fixed schedule: hourly feed polls and a small number of daily pages per source.

Contact

Questions or a request to stop crawling a site: use the Report page on this site. The request is answered by the operator.