How Phrasemill sources data

Phrasemill collates agent and agency data automatically from public websites. That process can make mistakes. Where we make a call — a taste tag, a match, a represented book — we surface the evidence behind it so you can check. If you come across something that is wrong, please tell us.

Primary sources

Our primary source is public website text from agents and agencies: bios, submission pages, FAQs, wishlist pages, and similar material. When a tag appears on a profile, Phrasemill stores the quoted span that supported it and shows a link to the source page when that link can be resolved.

Author and book mentions come from those same crawled websites — including “in the vein of” and titles agents say they have enjoyed — not from interviews, MSWL feeds, or deal announcements. Find agents by authors they mention.

Secondary sources

Some represented-book and author signals use public Open Library metadata, such as book subjects or author information. When evidence comes from Open Library rather than an agent's own page, Phrasemill labels that provenance separately.

How tags are made

A weekly pipeline crawls source pages, extracts taste signals with quoted spans, normalizes those signals to a controlled tag vocabulary, and materializes the current tags on agent and agency profiles. This is automatic. Evidence is shown with the decision so you can read the underlying text before you rely on a match.

When a person is involved

Extraction is automatic, but where two model readings of the same page disagree, the field goes to a person to resolve. They open the agent's own page and decide. Agent profiles mark submission status as Editor-checked when that has happened recently, alongside the date of the last automatic read — the two are shown separately because they are different things.

What we do not use for tag evidence

Phrasemill does not use interviews, MSWL feeds, deal databases, or deal announcements as taste-tag evidence. If a profile includes an MSWL link, that means the link was found on the agent's site; it does not mean MSWL entries were ingested as tag sources.

If something is wrong

Please tell us. When you are signed in, you can flag the evidence on an agent or agency profile. You can also email hello@phrasemill.com. Include the agent, agency, or tag you were looking at and what seemed off.