AxionReader

AxionReader is the reading bot of Axion Labs (Zsolt Dios, United Kingdom), a small publisher of sourced consumer-rights data sites (appealsdesk.co.uk, denialfacts.com, nycticketfacts.com, mtdfacts.co.uk, screeningfacts.com). It reads public web pages, public feeds and public documents so those sites can cite their sources with a date. It does not train models, it does not resell content, and it does not post anywhere.

How it identifies itself

User-Agent	`AxionReader/1.0 (+https://getaxionlabs.com)`
Access type	Direct — run by one operator from its own infrastructure (a Windows workstation and one Hetzner VPS).
Identity attestation	Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). Every signed request carries `Signature-Agent: "https://open.getaxionlabs.com"`, `Signature-Input` and `Signature`. Public keys: `https://open.getaxionlabs.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory` (served signed, per draft-meunier-http-message-signatures-directory-03).
Contact	hello@getaxionlabs.com — a person answers. To be excluded, write once; we stop the same day.

How it behaves

Obeys robots.txt. A page that disallows us is not read.
Paces itself: at most one request every 2 to 4 seconds per host; stops on a 429 rather than retrying in a loop.
Stops at walls: a login page, a CAPTCHA or a block page ends the read. Nothing here works around a site's defences.
Reads text. It fetches HTML, JSON, Atom/RSS and PDF; it does not fetch images, video or ad scripts.
Volume is small: a research publisher's reading, measured in hundreds of pages a day across the whole web, not millions.

What the reading is for

Source verification for the sites above: every fact they publish carries the URL it came from and the date it was checked. AxionReader is how the checking is done. The same publisher exposes its own data to machines on the same terms it asks of others — free with attribution, signed answer receipts, a citation object on every machine endpoint. See the doors registry and the agent concierge.

Verify a request came from us

Fetch the key directory above, take the Ed25519 key whose thumbprint matches the keyid in our Signature-Input, and verify the signature over the covered components (@authority and signature-agent) as RFC 9421 describes. Our own verifier and signer are published, source included, in axion-readers (tools/botauth.py).

Published 6 September 2026. Operator: Axion Labs, hello@getaxionlabs.com.