I recently discovered a site called RSS Amplifier which syndicated 19 articles in full from my full-text ATOM feed to its own site and under its own banner without permission. While it did so with attribution and a link back, syndicating, or effectively publicly re-publishing entire articles without my consent is plainly contrary to the copyright statement in my footer and this site’s About Page. The issue is compounded by the fact that RSS Amplifier is, by its own description, in the business of selling access to AI companies and crawlers. Below, I present the story of how I discovered what RSS Amplifier is doing, my thoughts on the matter, my own remedy, and some suggestions for the human and AI developers of the free and open source RSS Amplifier to consider in making their project less offensive to my sensibilities as someone who spends a good amount of time and money maintaining The New Leaf Journal as a free site for people to read and (I hope) enjoy. To the extent which you, the reader, may share in my sentiments, consider this article a public service announcement.
Discovering RSS Amplifier in My Logs
I was checking my server logs on Tuesday, September 1, 2026 (I forget what prompted me). I saw a user-agent that I did not recognize in my live logs.
Sep 02 00:38:45 152.55.176.99 - - [02/Sep/2026:04:38:45 +0000] “GET /nintendo-64-at-30-and-my-n64-memories/ HTTP/1.1” 403 199 “-” “rssamplifier.com reader (+https://rssamp.com/about)”
That was not my first capture, but one after I had blocked RSS Amplifier’s bots.
RSS Amplifier Re-Publishes 19 NLJ Articles Without Permission
As regular readers will know, I encourage people who enjoy reading at least some of my articles to follow The New Leaf Journal using one of its feeds (we offer RSS, ATOM, RDF, and JSON). Moreover, I offer full-text feeds as a courtesy to feed subscribers, allowing them to read my full articles through the comfort of a feed reader (even at the expense of my Koko Analytics page hit statistics). For that reason, I enjoy seeing new feed fetchers in my logs. RSS Amplifier? Surely this was some sort of nice new feed project. The footer reveals that RSS Amplifier was built by a company called Profullstack, Inc, which has a website. To RSS Amplifier’s credit (there will not be much credit in this review), it includes an About page URL in the user agent string, so I decided to investigate.
I present an August 23, 2026 capture of the About Page for RSS Amplifier, which is consistent with the current version:
The independent web is still there — it is just hard to find, and increasingly hard for anything automated to read. Most large sites now block AI crawlers outright. We do the opposite: every page here is open, and the whole directory is published as JSON, OPML and plain text so an agent can read it in one request.
With that, my hope that RSS Amplifier was an exciting, human-focused feed service, were dashed. The above passage is obfuscatory in a way that suggests that the chatbot that composed it was placed in a bandanna and spun around 5-6 times before generating text. But it is not so obfuscatory that we cannot diagram the two sentences.
In short, RSS Amplifier notes that it is hard to find independent websites. I would agree it is hard for people who almost exclusively rely on algorithmic social media and search portals. For example, The New Leaf Journal is present in search engines and Google has been our biggest regular referrer throughout our existence, but I doubt there are many queries for which one of my articles would be the top result. However, RSS Amplifier segues into its main purpose. “The independent web is … increasingly hard for anything automated to read” (emphasis added). Pour one out for the bots and scrapers. Oddly, whoever (or whatever) wrote (or generated) this text briefly loses the plot, going from the “independent web” to “large sites” in complaining that “[m]ost large sites block AI crawlers outright.” But we can assume from context that RSS Amplifier is also concerned with small web sites blocking AI crawlers. But fear not, there is a solution!
[E]very page here is open, and the whole directory is published as JSON, OPML and plain text so an agent can read it in one request.
Translation: If your bot or scraper that is being denied access to website A, RSS Amplifier will re-publish material from website and give your bot or scraper full access.
The About Page gave me a bad feeling about what RSS Amplifier was doing. I decided to search for my own site to confirm my suspicions. As of the publication date of this article, I have submitted a take-down request (demand) to RSS Amplifier through its contact form, so I present an archived version of its page for my site based on my expectation that it will be taken down (not to mention because I do not want to promote the live version).
RSS Amplifier catalogued my articles from June 20, 2026 through August 25, 2020. My feeds show my most recent 15 articles, and RSS Amplifier has 19, so we can infer based on the publication dates of my articles that it first crawled The New Leaf Journal between August 13 and 17. Of course, even with its questionable About Page, I would not have necessarily had a problem with RSS Amplifier had it, for example, included just links to and short excerpts from my articles. For example, I am happy that The New Leaf Journal is present in numerous directories such as Ye Olde Blogroll, Minifeed, and powRSS (just a few examples), all of which follow my feed and provide links to my articles with brief excerpts. Of course, and unsurprisingly based on RSS Amplifier’s About Page, that is not quite what RSS Amplifier is doing.
Back on August 3, 2026, I published Calvin Coolidge’s Homestead Oath of Office. This is one of my longest articles, coming in somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 words (too long, I know, but I kept finding new information and I was up against a self-imposed deadline). I put a good amount of work into it before publishing it on The New Leaf Journal, a non-revenue generating writing website I fund with my own money and support on my own time. Now let us see it on RSS Amplifer:
- Wayback Machine capture of RSS Amplifier’s Re-Publication of My Article
- Archive Today capture of RSS Amplifier’s Re-Publication of My Article
As I sadly expected, RSS Amplifier re-published my entire essay – with attribution (at least they did that much), but without permission. Moreover, it lists the date of publication as August 4, 2026, which is presumptively when it fetched and re-published my article, not when I actually published it in the first instance. RSS Amplifier did the same thing regarding every article it fetched from NLJ.
I noted one smaller issue. While RSS Amplifier does include a clean link back to my site and feed, it also lists its own subscription options in the form of RSS, ATOM, JSON, and markdown feeds for my site. Thus, it is not only re-publishing my articles without permission, but also offering its own NLJ-specific feeds for its re-publication of my articles when I already offer full-text feeds.
Part of the reason RSS Amplifier was able to re-publish my articles before I blocked its crawlers was because I offer full-text feeds as a courtesy to people who take the time to add my site to their personal feed collections. I did note that RSS amplifier does seem to only offer snippets for non-full-text feeds. The possibility of illicit scraping is one reason why many sites that offer feeds compromise and do not have full-text feeds. Lest anyone things I was previously naive and blindsided by RSS Amplifier’s malfeasance, I specifically addressed the potential downside of offering a full-text feed back in 2024:
While I am strongly in favor of offering full-text feeds, I was aware of two cases against them. Firstly, many sites want to drive visitor traffic to the site itself. There may be many reasons for this from ads and analytics to wanting visitors to see writing and media as it is presented by the author. Secondly, some sites opt to offer excerpts because content scrapers, often nefarious, can feast on full text feeds. Neither of these issues weighed heavily on my own decision making – my focus is on writing more than presentation, and while I do not like the idea of my writing being stolen, I doubt that whether I offer full-text feeds is decisive.
Alas, in the case of RSS Amplifier, it appears that my full-text feeds were decisive. Score one for the anti-full-text feed crowd.
While I was “punished” for the courtesy of offering full-text feeds, it occurred to me that the situation would have been worse if I offered full-archive feeds, meaning every single article I have published in the feed. Back in September 2024, I published my thoughts on full-archive feeds. In my case, I opted against full-archive feeds because I have a large number of articles, some of which have substantial word counts, and I think that it would not make for a good experience for someone to subscribe to my feed and suddenly see 1335 (as of the publication of this article) new unread items in their feed reader. Thus, my reason for not offering full-archive feeds was largely focused on reader experience. But I will note here that had I offered a full-archive feed, RSS Amplifier would have re-published 1333 New Leaf Journal articles instead of 19.
My Problem With RSS Amplifier
I preface the following section by noting that the forthcoming points represent my own concerns about what RSS Amplifier is doing as the administrator of The New Leaf Journal, The Emu Café Social, and The Newsletter Leaf Journal. The specific points one may be concerned with (or even approve of) will of course differ from writer to writer.
My issue with RSS Amplifier is that it is re-publishing my full articles. It does attempt to sugar-coat the issue, but unsuccessfully in my humble opinion.
Firstly, from RSS Amplifier’s Training Data Page answering where the site’s data come from:
Public feeds [the sites’] publishers chose to syndicate.
I choose to syndicate full-text feeds. However, I syndicate feeds for human readers to follow my site directly, or, alternatively, for legitimate search engines (albeit the major search engines do not rely on my feeds for indexing). I do not syndicate feeds for RSS Amplifier or anyone else to re-publish my articles under their own banner.
Of course, RSS Amplifier insists it is not a publisher. From the “What we store” section of its About Page:
Feed metadata and the summaries the feed itself publishes — the same thing any reader would show. Posts link back to the author’s own site; we are a directory, not a mirror.
I disagree. They are re-publishing entire articles from sites that offer full-text feeds and offering RSS Amplifier feeds as an alternative to those sites own feeds. While I will grant that RSS Amplifier does correctly attribute articles to the destination site and include backlinks, it “mirrored,” re-published, and/or syndicated 19 New Leaf Journal articles without notification or asking for permission.
Finally, RSS Amplifier’s claim that it is nothing more than a simple web directory is belied by the fact that it advertises itself on its About Page as an end-around website restrictions against bots and crawlers.
Most large sites now block AI crawlers outright. We do the opposite: every page here is open, and the whole directory is published as JSON, OPML and plain text so an agent can read it in one request.
It only works as an end-around robots.txt and server side blocking rules to the extent which it mirrors, re-publishes, or syndicates entire articles (choose your favorite term).
While RSS Amplifier does advertise itself as being a service for bots and crawlers, I will, in fairness, note that they do bury an option for webmasters to opt out of having their site’s data sold to AI companies. From the “Where it comes from” section of the Training data page:
A publisher may be excluded from the corpus while staying in the directory, by writing to [email redacted]. It is a separate ask from removal on purpose — ‘list my blog, but do not sell my writing to a model’ is a coherent position and nobody should have to leave the directory to hold it. Excluded feeds, and every post and article belonging to them, are absent from every stream.
While I am not a fan of RSS Amplifier’s commercial AI bot circumvention service, my more pressing issue is the fact that it re-published (or mirrored or syndicated) my articles without permission. Thus, I asked, or rather insisted upon, wholesale removal from their directory. For whatever it is worth for those who are primarily concerned with AI bot scraping, I would be inclined to doubt RSS Amplifier’s bot-specific opt-out counts for much in any event. From my reading, it appears to cover only RSS Amplifier selling access to its data to models, not models scraping RSS Amplifier without buying data.
Blocking RSS Amplifier
I decided to block RSS Amplifier via .htaccess (both this site and ECS run on Apache servers) and robots.txt. As of publication time, its crawler is RSSAmplifierBot (according to and consistent with its docs, albeit I also saw rssamplifier.com reader in my logs, although I have decided now to not specifically block that one since I suspect it may concern people following links from RSS Amplifier to NLJ, which I would not want to block so long as they are not re-producing my articles). My block did keep it from fetching my scholarly September 1, 2026 article, Links From Feeds and the Story of “Sugar Baby Riri”. You will find them in my Codeberg blocklist repository.
RSS Amplifier states on its About Page that it will remove feeds on request without asking why. Shortly before publication time, I made a request and will add an update when or if it is acted upon.
Suggestions For RSS Amplifier
Suffice it to say from the foregoing, but I am not a fan of what I have seen from and read about RSS Amplifier thus far. At the moment, it serves as proof that open source (see its source code on GitHub) is not synonymous with good (lest anyone thought otherwise). But I am a fan of both feeds and web directories and would prefer to not see the courtesy of people who offer feeds (and especially those who offer full-text and full-archive feeds) abused, so in the gracious spirit of constructive criticism, I conclude with some constructive criticism for the human and AI developers of RSS Amplifier to consider.
- Offering a full-text feed is not the same thing as consenting to RSS Amplifier, or anyone else, mirroring, re-publishing, or syndicating in full articles from that feed (I figure we ought to cover all of the bases). For example, while I offer a full-text feed, Minifeed only includes a the meta description of my articles before the link. This, or a brief excerpt, is fine. So long as RSS Amplifier is accepting public submissions, it should default to only showing excerpts or meta descriptions absent (A) a permissible license which allows for re-publication or syndication with credit; or (B) the express consent or approval of the site owner.
- RSS Amplifier should not offer its own versions of individual site feeds for sites that already offer feeds, especially when those feeds contain the full text of the article. For example, because I offer full text feeds in every common format for feed readers, there is no reason whatsoever for RSS Amplifier to create its own full-text feeds for my website, which would have people read the RSS Amplifier versions of my articles, other than making it easier for bots and scrapers to train off of or “consume” my writing.
- I will note to avoid misunderstandings that I consider RSS Amplifier’s feeds distinguishable from services that can create feeds for sites that do not offer them, such as RSS Bridge, RSSHub, Five Filters, Kill the Newsletter, or even Google News (albeit not directly in that case). These are designed for individuals to be able to follow sites directly and do not entail re-publishing full articles under a third-party banner. Of course, mileage may vary – those are just my own two-cents.
- I also consider this distinguishable from some aggregate feeds which may bundle my site’s feed with other feeds. See e.g., Minifeed, powRSS, and Ye Olde Blogroll (noted previously) or Kagi Small Web, which have global feeds including articles from my feed, but do not simply re-produce my full-text feed.
- Finally, while it does not take a brain titan to parse RSS Amplifier’s for bot focus from its About Page, it nevertheless strikes me as disingenuous how it endeavors to present itself at points as a simple web directory. I will note that I do not oppose per se a service that scrapes data from consenting webmasters for AI crawlers. While I would unsurprisingly have no interest in being part of such a project, but there are many perspectives out there. To the extent RSS Amplifier claims to want to be both a simple web index for human beings and for bots, it should (A) default to assuming that sites do not want their data scraped by or sold to AI crawlers without a clear statement to the contrary (the fact a site may not block crawlers via robots.txt or on the server side does not qualify as a “clear statement to the contrary”) and (B) only include sites in the AI data-set with consent. Additionally, to the extent which RSS Amplifier wants to include full-text feed content (I note again they should not do that without consent), it should explain and clearly document how, assuming a webmaster consents to full-text feed context being syndicated to RSS Amplifier but not to scraping or AI sales, it intends to prevent that full-text content from being scraped. (Note that while I tend to disfavor “content” these days, I will use it her since RSS Amplifier is not only syndicating writing and a surface glance at its homepage indicates that a good amount of what it is syndicating could be described as “content” in the negative sense.)
Of course, those are just my suggestions. My main priority is having my own sites kept out of RSS Amplifier’s index.
Additional Project By Same Company
Very shortly after discovering RSS Amplifier in my logs, I investigated another new entry:
Sep 02 01:19:54 152.55.176.156 - - [02/Sep/2026:05:19:54 +0000] "GET /feed/atom/ HTTP/1.1" 403 199 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BriskBot/1.0; +https://brisk.news)"
Brisk News, like RSS Amplifier, seems to re-publish articles from around the web (or however they would describe it). On its home page, above a list of articles from various sources, it advises visitors to “Click any article to read its AI summary and listen to an audio briefing.” Like RSS Amplifier, it includes the entire text of syndicated articles on the Brisk News website, while providing one small link to the original source that is not featured prominently. That was more than enough for me to block Brisk News. But it was not until a few days later when I noticed that Brisk News, like RSS Amplifier, is created by Profullstack. For anyone who shares my concerns about RSS Amplifier syndicating the contents of entire articles onto its website, I would also recommend blocking BriskBot.
Conclusion
With that, I wrap up the story of how RSS Amplifier managed to publish under its own banner 19 articles from my full-text feed before I very fortunately noticed its crawler and shut it down as soon as I saw what it was doing. Again, I publish this not to tell anyone what they should think, but rather to share my own experiences and perspectives, which may be deemed a public service announcement for the consideration of my fellow internet webmasters (indieweb, small web, big web, or however they may define themselves).
Lest my feed subscribers be concerned, I intend to continue offering my full-text feeds, even at the risk of their being scraped (I will note this is not the first time my feed has been scraped, albeit it is the most comprehensive incident that I am aware of). In the end, being illicitly scraped and having my writing vacuumed is an unfortunate part of publishing my writing online, and there is always a balance to be struck between protecting my intellectual property and welcoming human readers to my digital café. Full-text feeds will stay, but this incident most certainly did not make me reassess my decision to not offer full-archive feeds.
