A feed
What we check
We look in the home page’s head for a link to an RSS or Atom feed. If there is one, we fetch it and check that it’s valid XML with at least one item in it. A working feed passes; a linked feed that is broken or empty gets half; no feed scores nothing. If more than one feed is linked, we judge the first.
For a site that says it is a product, an app, or an organization, and has no blog, this is information only: a company without posts doesn’t need a feed. We count a site as having a blog if the home page links to a section like blog, news, journal, posts, articles, writing, notes, updates, insights, or stories.
Why it matters
A feed is the fastest way for a machine to learn what’s new on a site: one small file, newest first, with titles, dates, and links. Crawlers and aggregators check feeds far more often than they recrawl whole sites, so new posts get noticed sooner.
We also use your feed to find your newest articles, so the checks for authors, dates, and citations judge your actual writing, not just the pages near the top of the site.
How to pass
- Turn on your platform’s feed if it has one (WordPress, Ghost, Substack, and most blog tools do), or have your developer publish one.
- Link it from the head of the home page (and ideally every page), so it can be found:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example" href="https://example.com/feed.xml"> - Make sure the feed loads and lists your posts, newest first, each with a title, link, and date.