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Google Feedfetcher

Feedfetcher is used for crawling RSS or Atom feeds for Google News and PubSubHubbub.
Feed Fetcher

What is Google Feedfetcher?

Google Feedfetcher is a feed fetcher. Feedfetcher is used for crawling RSS or Atom feeds for Google News and PubSubHubbub.

Google Feedfetcher keeps feeds and syndicated content fresh. Faster, wider distribution increases the chance your content is seen, referenced, and picked up by downstream platforms, including some that feed AI systems.

Like any automated client, Google Feedfetcher consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle Google Feedfetcher

Whether to allow Google Feedfetcher depends on whether you rely on the service behind it. Use a robots.txt rule to allow or disallow it.

To control Google Feedfetcher, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: GoogleFeedfetcher
Disallow: /

Replace the user-agent token above with the exact string Google Feedfetcher sends, check the operator's documentation, since display names and user-agent tokens can differ.

Google Feedfetcher generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • A site owner spots Google Feedfetcher in access logs and confirms it against the operator's documented user agent.
  • An operations team allows Google Feedfetcher so the service it powers keeps working as expected.

Related bots

Apple Podcasts

Apple Podcasts crawler that only accesses URLs associated with registered content on Apple Podcasts. Does not follow robots.txt.

Feed Fetcher

Artemis Web Crawler

Artemis is a calm web reader with which you can follow websites and blogs.

Feed Fetcher

Awario RSS Bot

One of Awario's primary web crawlers specialized in collecting RSS feed data.

Feed Fetcher

FlipboardProxy

Fetches and prepares website content for presentation in the Flipboard application.

Feed Fetcher

Google Publisher Center

Google Publisher Center fetches and processes feeds that publishers explicitly supplied for use in Google News landing pages.

Feed Fetcher

Frequently asked questions about Google Feedfetcher

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Google Feedfetcher is a feed fetcher; its operator is identified in its user-agent string and public documentation.

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