# Authentication and access — comparethecloud.net

Compare the Cloud's editorial content is fully public and free to read. Agents and
crawlers do not need to authenticate to read any published content, and there is no
public write API.

## Public — no authentication

- Editorial: `/articles`, `/news`, `/opinions`, `/stories`, `/authors`
- Provider directory: `/directory`
- Machine-readable: `/llms.txt`, `/sitemap.xml`, `/rss.xml`, `/.well-known/mcp.json`,
  `/.well-known/api-catalog`, `/.well-known/agent-card.json`,
  `/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json`

These are served as standard HTML plus JSON-LD structured data (Article, NewsArticle,
Person, Organization, BreadcrumbList, FAQ where present). The AI crawlers GPTBot,
ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, anthropic-ai, Claude-Web, CCBot and PerplexityBot are
explicitly allowed in `/robots.txt`.

## Authenticated — staff only

- Content management (EmDash): `/_emdash/admin` — passkey, email or Google sign-in,
  for the editorial team.
- Site and directory admin: `/admin` — Cloudflare Access, restricted to staff.

There is no agent-facing login. For partnership, syndication or data enquiries, see
`/work-with-us` or `/contact`.