NewsBlur feed fetcher
NewsBlur is a personal RSS/Atom feed reader that polls subscribed feeds on a schedule and fetches new posts for its users. Its fetcher requests your feed (and sometimes the linked page) to deliver fresh items to people who subscribed in NewsBlur. It is a feed-reader fetcher, not a search engine, and its traffic scales with how many NewsBlur users follow your feed.
What this means
NewsBlur is a feed reader that lets people subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and read new posts in one place. To do that, it polls each subscribed feed periodically and fetches new entries.
If people follow your blog or site in NewsBlur, its fetcher will request your feed regularly. This is feed delivery to subscribers, not search indexing — treat it as feed-reader traffic.
How it identifies itself
NewsBlur uses a NewsBlur-identifying user-agent and, like many feed readers, may include an aggregate subscriber count in the user-agent so publishers can see roughly how many of its users follow the feed. That count is a number, not a list of people.
As with any client, the user-agent is a claim and can be copied. Match on the NewsBlur identity for routine feed traffic.
- Operator: NewsBlur (personal RSS/Atom feed reader)
- Behaviour: scheduled feed polling for subscribers
- User-agent may carry an aggregate subscriber count
robots.txt considerations
Feed readers generally fetch the feed URL a user explicitly subscribed to, so robots.txt is usually not the right tool to manage them. If you want to limit polling, conditional-request and caching headers (ETag, Last-Modified) reduce load more effectively than blocking.
robots.txt is honoured by compliant crawlers and is not an access control. Blocking a feed fetcher would simply stop your subscribers from receiving updates.
How it appears in analytics and logs
A NewsBlur request means the feed reader polled your feed to deliver new posts to its subscribers. It is feed-fetch bot traffic, not a human visit and not a search-index crawl; frequency reflects your feed's subscriber count and update cadence.
Diagnostic use case
Recognise NewsBlur feed polling in logs, distinguish RSS-reader fetching from search crawling, and read it as subscriber-driven feed delivery.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies NewsBlur feed fetches server-side as feed-reader bot traffic and surfaces them on the bot-intelligence surface, so feed polling stays separate from human analytics.
Common mistakes
- Reading the aggregate subscriber count in the user-agent as individual visitor identities.
- Blocking the feed fetcher and breaking updates for legitimate subscribers.
- Counting feed-poll requests as human readers in analytics.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Identification uses only the request user-agent. NewsBlur may report an aggregate subscriber count in its user-agent, which is a count, not identities. WebmasterID records the fetch as a bot event, separate from human analytics, and never attaches it to a profile.
Related pages
- Tiny Tiny RSS fetcher
Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) is a free, self-hosted RSS/Atom feed reader that individuals run on their own servers to follow feeds privately. Each TT-RSS instance polls the feeds its owner subscribes to and fetches new posts. Because it is self-hosted, requests originate from many independent installations rather than one central service, and it appears in logs as feed polling, not search indexing.
- Feedfetcher-Google — feed fetcher
Feedfetcher-Google is the user agent Google uses to fetch RSS and Atom feeds for Google products. Google documents that Feedfetcher is not used for indexing, and that because feed fetches are user-requested subscriptions, it is handled differently from indexing crawlers.
- Superfeedr feed fetcher
Superfeedr is a feed-handling service that polls and processes RSS/Atom feeds and pushes updates to subscribers, historically supporting real-time feed delivery via PubSubHubbub/WebSub. It fetches your feed URLs to detect new items, not your pages for search ranking. Its activity appears in logs as repeated feed fetches from Superfeedr infrastructure.
- Bot intelligence
Deterministic categorisation of feed readers and crawlers.
Sources and verification notes
- NewsBlur — RSS feed readerFeed reader that polls subscribed feeds; subscriber count reported in user-agent.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.