WebSub: Push Your Content to Subscribers in Seconds
RSS and JSON Feed are pull-based protocols. A subscriber's feed reader checks your feed every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes — depending on the reader's refresh rate. If you publish a time-sensitive post at 10:00 AM, some subscribers will not see it until 11:00 AM. By then, the conversation has moved on.
WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) converts pull-based feeds into push-based notifications. When you publish new content, a WebSub hub pushes the update to every subscriber within seconds — not minutes, not hours. Seconds.
After implementing WebSub across our 52-site network, our content reaches feed subscribers, AI crawlers, and aggregators in under 30 seconds from the moment of publication. The implementation is free. And it works with your existing RSS and JSON feeds.
How WebSub Works
WebSub is a W3C standard (previously a Google protocol) built on three components:
Publisher — Your site. It announces to a hub that it has a feed available for subscription.
Hub — A service that receives content from publishers and pushes it to subscribers. Google operates a public hub at https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. Several other free hubs exist, including Superfeedr.
Subscriber — Any service that wants to receive your content in real time. Feed readers, AI crawlers, aggregators, and monitoring services can all be WebSub subscribers.
The flow:
- Your feed includes a
<link>to the WebSub hub - A subscriber discovers the hub link and registers with the hub to receive updates from your feed
- When you publish new content, you ping the hub
- The hub fetches your updated feed
- The hub pushes the update to all registered subscribers
The critical difference from standard RSS: the subscriber never polls your feed. The hub pushes updates proactively. This eliminates the polling delay and reduces load on your server (subscribers hit the hub, not your site).
Implementation for Static Sites
For Eleventy-based static sites, the implementation has two parts: feed configuration and publish-time pinging.
Part 1: Add the hub link to your feeds.
In your RSS feed template, add the hub reference:
<atom:link rel="hub" href="https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" />
In your JSON Feed, add the hub in the top-level object:
{
"version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
"title": "The $100 Network",
"hubs": [
{ "type": "WebSub", "url": "https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" }
]
}
In your HTML <head>, add a link tag:
<link rel="hub" href="https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" />
These declarations tell any subscriber: "If you want real-time updates from this feed, register with this hub."
Part 2: Ping the hub on publish.
After your site builds and deploys, send a POST request to the hub telling it your feed has been updated:
curl -X POST \
-d "hub.mode=publish" \
-d "hub.url=https://the100dollarnetwork.com/feed.xml" \
https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
This ping tells the hub: "My feed at this URL has new content. Go fetch it and push it to subscribers."
For automated deployment, add this as a post-deploy hook. In Netlify, add a build plugin or a deploy notification webhook. In a CI/CD pipeline, add it as a post-deploy step:
# GitHub Actions post-deploy step
- name: Ping WebSub hub
run: |
curl -s -X POST \
-d "hub.mode=publish" \
-d "hub.url=https://the100dollarnetwork.com/feed.xml" \
https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
curl -s -X POST \
-d "hub.mode=publish" \
-d "hub.url=https://the100dollarnetwork.com/feed.json" \
https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
Ping both your RSS and JSON feeds. Different subscribers may be registered on different feed URLs.
Why Seconds Matter
The argument for WebSub is not just speed — it is competitive timing.
When you publish a data-driven analysis — say, a new state-by-state insurance rate comparison — the first source to appear in AI models' training data, feed readers, and aggregator indices has a structural advantage. AI models that encounter your analysis first are more likely to establish it as the authoritative source for that topic. Feed readers that display your post before competitors' means your analysis gets read and shared before alternatives appear.
In practice, the timing advantage works like this:
- You publish at 10:00:00 AM
- WebSub pushes the update to subscribers by 10:00:30 AM
- A competitor publishes on the same topic at 10:15 AM
- The competitor's content reaches feed subscribers at 10:30-11:00 AM (standard polling)
- By then, your content has been read, shared, and cited for 30-60 minutes
This first-mover timing is especially valuable for data publications, market analysis, and breaking coverage. In competitive verticals, being first by 30 minutes can mean being the cited source versus being the also-ran.
WebSub for AI Crawler Notification
AI crawlers from Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude do not subscribe to WebSub hubs in the traditional sense. But several AI indexing systems monitor WebSub-enabled feeds as a signal of content freshness and publication quality.
More importantly, WebSub-enabled feeds are consumed by feed aggregators and content monitoring services that AI crawlers do index. When your content reaches Feedly, Inoreader, and other aggregators within seconds via WebSub, those aggregators' pages (which AI crawlers do monitor) reflect your new content faster.
The indirect path — publisher to hub to aggregator to AI crawler — is still significantly faster than the direct path of waiting for an AI crawler to revisit your site on its own schedule.
Combining WebSub with IndexNow
WebSub pushes your content to feed subscribers. IndexNow pushes your content to search engines. Together, they ensure that your new content reaches both human subscribers and search engine indices within minutes of publication.
The combined deploy pipeline:
# 1. Deploy site
netlify deploy --prod
# 2. Ping WebSub hub (for feed subscribers)
curl -s -X POST \
-d "hub.mode=publish" \
-d "hub.url=https://the100dollarnetwork.com/feed.xml" \
https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
# 3. Ping IndexNow (for search engines)
curl -s "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?\
host=the100dollarnetwork.com&\
key=YOUR_INDEXNOW_KEY&\
url=https://the100dollarnetwork.com/blog/new-post/"
Three requests, total execution time under two seconds, and your content is simultaneously pushed to feed subscribers and search engine indices.
Network-Wide Deployment
For our 52-site network, the WebSub implementation was templated:
- Feed templates in the shared codebase include the hub link tag
- Deploy hooks on each site's hosting configuration include the hub ping
- A centralized ping script accepts a site URL and pings both WebSub and IndexNow
The per-site implementation time was approximately five minutes — adding the deploy hook and verifying the ping. For the full network, the deployment took one afternoon.
The Results
After deploying WebSub across all 52 sites:
- Content delivery to feed subscribers: Under 30 seconds from publication (previously 15-60 minutes)
- Feed reader indexing (Feedly, Inoreader): Content appears within 2 minutes of publication (previously 30-120 minutes)
- AI crawler pick-up time: Reduced by an estimated 40-60% (measured by first AI citation timestamp vs. publication timestamp)
- Monthly hub pings across the network: ~200 (approximately 4 publishes per site per month)
- Cost: $0 (Google's public hub is free, IndexNow is free)
The speed improvement is most impactful for sites that publish time-sensitive content — market analysis, data releases, regulatory updates. For evergreen content, the timing advantage is less critical but still beneficial for establishing citation priority.
The complete WebSub implementation — including the multi-site ping pipeline, the IndexNow integration, and the real-time content distribution stack — is covered in The $100 Network by J.A. Watte. Chapter 28 covers real-time content distribution across a site network.
This article is based on techniques from The $100 Network. If you're just getting started, begin with The $97 Launch to build your first site, then The $20 Agency to set up your marketing stack.