We read music writing so people can find their way back to it.
synff helps people reconnect with music. The writing about it is where much of that reconnection happens.
A review or an interview puts a record somewhere: in a scene, beside the people who shaped it, in the middle of an argument about what it means. When a listener wants to know why a record matters and where to go next, that is where the answer lives. We think this writing is part of the cultural fabric around music, and that it deserves readers who arrive curious.
synffbot is the crawler that reads it on our behalf. This page explains what it does with what it reads, how it behaves on your site, and how to tell it no.
What synffbot does
When a listener asks synff about an artist, synffbot looks for editorial writing about them: album reviews, interviews, features. It reads each piece to find the connections the writer made, which artists, scenes, and records they placed this one among, and keeps that connection together with a citation to the article.
Those connections become the Threads and recommendations listeners see. Each one shows the publication's name and links to the piece, so the listener who wants the full argument goes to you for it. Every time a connection appears, it says that a writer at your publication saw it first.
How it behaves
It says who it is
Every request carries the name synffbot/1.0 (+https://www.synff.co/bot), so a publication can see us in its logs, look us up, and decide.
It follows the rules a site sets
synffbot reads a site's robots.txt before anything else and keeps to it, including how fast it may go. It also reads the newer content signals some publishers have started adding. A site that asks not to be indexed is left alone. A site that asks not to have its writing used for training already has that from us.
Nothing it reads trains a model
synff uses writing to find connections between artists and to send readers to the piece. When we use AI to read, we only use models that run with zero data retention: they keep nothing and learn nothing from what they read. What a listener sees is the connection and the link to your page, never an AI-written version of your writing.
It sends readers to the writing
A connection in synffnames the publication and links to the article it came from. Listeners see a line or two of context; the argument, the prose, and the writer's voice stay on your page, where they belong.
It looks for specific things and goes gently
synffbot searches for writing about particular artists and albums rather than sweeping a whole site. From any one site it fetches at most a few dozen pages for an artist, spaces its requests, and uses the publication's own feed or API when one exists.
How to say no
Add these two lines to your robots.txt and synffbot will stop at its next visit:
User-agent: synffbot Disallow: /
If you would like writing we have already read to be removed, or you want to talk about how your publication appears in synff, write to hello@synff.co. A person will reply.
The methodology page explains what synff builds from this writing and why.
Talk to us