The Spread the Word crawler
Updated 15 October 2026
Spread the Word fetches public pages and APIs on behalf of its users, to find conversations relevant to their products and to track replies to what they published.
How to recognise it
Requests carry the User-Agent SpreadTheWord/<version> (+https://spread-the-word.steadycircuit.com/bot).
How it behaves
- Reads only public pages and official public APIs. It never signs in to read.
- Respects robots.txt (RFC 9309), cached for up to a day per site.
- Paces requests per host: no more than one request every one or two seconds to any site, and backs off when it receives errors or rate limits.
- Fetches only places a user has approved and threads found there, not whole sites.
Opting out
Disallow SpreadTheWord in your robots.txt and it will stop fetching your site within a day:
User-agent: SpreadTheWord / Disallow: /
Contact
Questions or problems: hello@steadycircuit.com.