How Stewbot treats recipes
Stewbot helps people who are new to cooking follow a recipe one step at a time. Every recipe comes from someone who worked hard on it, so Stewbot is built to treat it fairly: it reads a page only when someone asks, keeps their copy private, and always points back to where it came from.
A page is read only when someone asks
Stewbot reads a recipe page only when a person saves it or cooks from it, and it reads it on their own iPhone or iPad. There’s no crawler, no scraping, no background fetching and no database of recipes. Stewbot’s server never visits recipe sites.
- From Safari, Stewbot reads the page the person already has open, through Safari’s share sheet.
- From a pasted link, the person’s device fetches that one page, the way a browser does. It names itself as Stewbot, with its version and this site’s address, as in
Stewbot/1.0.0 (+https://stewbot.app), and sends no cookies.
Stewbot uses the recipe data a site publishes for search engines when there is some, and reads the page’s text only when there isn’t.
What a cookbook keeps
- A private copy for the person who saved it: the recipe’s title, ingredients, steps, servings and times as written, next to Stewbot’s simpler version. Never the page’s story, photos or ads.
- It stays in that person’s cookbook. It’s never shown to anyone else, shared, kept by its link for others, sold, or used to train AI.
- Every recipe shows where it came from, with its site’s name and an “Open original” link.
- Sharing a recipe from Stewbot shares its original link, and nothing else.
- Stewbot copies no photos. Each recipe shows a simple illustration instead.
Recipes for subscribers
Pages written for subscribers keep just their name and link. To cook from one, a subscriber uses Cook now: Stewbot reads the page they’re signed in to in Safari, walks them through it, and keeps nothing once they’re done.
Nothing public
Stewbot has no public pages, profiles, feeds, ratings or “popular recipes”, and a recipe never moves from one person’s cookbook to another’s. Its own words, such as its cooking words and tips, are written for Stewbot, and it comes with no recipes of its own.
If you’d rather Stewbot kept just links
Robots.txt and “noai” tags speak to crawlers and to AI training. Stewbot is neither: it reads one page a person has open, when they ask, and it trains nothing, so it doesn’t look for them. If you run a recipe site and would rather Stewbot kept just links to your recipes, ask, and it will.
Email support@stewbot.app from an address at your site, or tell us how we can check the site is yours. Once your site is on Stewbot’s list:
- new saves from your site keep just each recipe’s name, link and credit;
- Cook now is off for your site;
- recipes already saved from it become just their names and links, in every cookbook and every backup, within a day.
The links and credit stay, so people can still find their way back to you. Your site’s subdomains are covered too. If you change your mind, tell us.
Copyright
If you believe something in Stewbot infringes your copyright, the terms say how to reach our copyright agent.