What it does
SimuzeBot reads the agenda page of music venues that have a page on Simuze, so people can see what is on in their city and go to the venue's own site for the details.
It fetches the agenda address that was registered for that venue, by the venue itself or by someone at Simuze, the calendar or feed that page points to, the pages of the shows listed there and the images those pages use. For the venue page itself it reads the homepage once, for the logo and a photo. When the agenda address is not known yet, it may look at the site's own sitemap and its own event API (a WordPress site's /wp-json/ index, or a few usual addresses such as /api/agenda on a site built as a JavaScript app) to find the right page; it never crawls the rest of a site beyond that. Where a site keeps its agenda in the data it sends along with the page, that data is read instead of the markup. It never reads ticket shops, listing sites, social media or other collections of events. A ticket link the venue publishes is shown as a link and not visited.
When a page has none of that (no calendar, no feed, no event API) but does list its shows in plain text, SimuzeBot reads the dates straight out of the page. When even that fails, the page's text is sent to Soriku, Simuze's own AI, with one question only: which of these shows are actually listed here, and where do they link to. Soriku never invents a show; anything it names has to actually be on the page and link to a page that was actually there, or it is thrown out before it ever reaches Simuze. Soriku is not used for anything else about a venue's page, and nothing it reads is used to train it.
How to recognise it
Every request carries this user agent:
SimuzeBot/1.0 (+https://simuze.com/bot)How often it comes by
Once a day per venue, one venue at a time, with at least two seconds between requests to the same website, or longer when robots.txt asks for a Crawl-delay. The page of a show is read again at most once a week. It sends the ETag and Last-Modified values from its previous visit, so an agenda that has not changed costs almost nothing to serve. After ten failed visits in a row it stops trying and someone at Simuze takes a look.
What we show
For each show we keep what the venue publishes about it: the title, the date, doors and start time, the room, the lineup, genres, the price, the description, the image and the ticket link, together with the link to the show on the venue's own website. The image is shown straight from the venue's own site, with the venue named as its source, so nothing is copied onto Simuze that does not need to be. On Simuze the show gets its own page with the venue's name and the website it came from, and the ticket link always goes to the venue or the ticket shop the venue uses. It is never presented as something you can book or buy on Simuze. Every act on the lineup links to an artist page on Simuze; when there is none yet, we make one that the artist can claim, and remove it again when no show refers to it and nobody has taken it over. Thirty days after the show we delete it again, unless people used it on Simuze, for example by saying they went.
An artist page shows a photo of the act when we can find one they published themselves (their own site, their Bandcamp, or the artwork their streaming services already show). When there is none, the page may use the photo a venue published for one of that act's shows as its wide header, shown straight from the venue's own site and credited there with a link back to the show. An artist who takes over their page can replace it with whatever they want; a picture someone uploaded is never overwritten.
Opting out
SimuzeBot respects robots.txt. To keep it away from your whole site, add this:
User-agent: SimuzeBot
Disallow: /When a site names SimuzeBot directly, that rule is obeyed to the letter. A site that instead blocks every bot by default but opens its agenda to Googlebot is one we read too, the way Google may, at the pace Google is asked to keep. When SimuzeBot is blocked by name, or Googlebot is blocked as well, it reads nothing, full stop. The venue is asked once, in its outreach email, for permission to read the agenda anyway, or for a feed or calendar link we can use instead; say yes through the feedback form and we switch it on.
A venue page nobody runs has a remove button: one click takes the page, its shows and images off Simuze, and it stays off. You can also send us a message through the feedback form. If you run the venue, you can claim its page on Simuze and manage the agenda address yourself. How pages get on Simuze explains why we list venues at all.