What is Google Feedfetcher?
A person or product feature asks Google Feedfetcher to retrieve an RSS or Atom feed. Google uses it for Google News and WebSub, and it stores and refreshes feeds requested through apps or services. This is a user-triggered feed grabber, not the general Googlebot crawl of a website.
Its published HTTP user agent is FeedFetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html). Google also publishes IP data for user-triggered fetchers, which can help distinguish its traffic from a copied header. Requests should normally concentrate on feed URLs rather than move through unrelated pages.
Google explicitly says Feedfetcher ignores robots.txt because it acts on a user's request. That conflicts with the respectsRobotsTxt value preserved in this bot. A robots group is still a readable statement of preference, but it is not an effective denial for this fetcher.
Feedfetcher can keep feed data current in the Google products that requested it. Google does not assign it a generative search or model training role, and it is not a substitute for Googlebot. One of these requests does not establish that the linked article was indexed for Search or used by an AI system.
