What is Feedly?
Direct Answer: Feedly RSS fetcher service operated by Feedly, collecting and refreshing user-initiated feeds.
Feedly Fetcher is a user-controlled feed retriever that collects and periodically refreshes RSS or Atom feeds when users add them to their Feedly or other applications built on top of the Feedly cloud. It acts as a direct agent of the human user, not as a robot, and ignores robots.txt entries. Fetcher requests come from explicit action by human users, and it attempts to obtain the content of the feed to display it.
User-Agent Identification
The following user-agent strings identify Feedly in your live traffic data:
Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 1 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)
robots.txt Rules for Feedly
Respects robots.txt: No
Robots.txt has limited effect on user-initiated bots
Feedly is triggered by user actions within Feedly's products. While Feedly states it respects robots.txt, the bot operates differently from autonomous crawlers — it fetches specific URLs on demand rather than systematically spidering your site. Server-log monitoring is the only reliable way to verify what actually happens.
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Crawl Behavior
Frequency:On Average, Once Every Hour
Request Pattern:Requests Come From Explicit Action By Human Users Who Add Feeds To Their Feedly
Official Documentation Quotes
"Fetcher retrieves feeds only after users have explicitly added them to their Feedly. Fetcher behaves as a direct agent of the human user, not as a robot, so it ignores robots.txt entries."
Crawl Activity Index
Relative crawl activity for Feedly over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.
View recent activity data (last 7 days)
| Date | Activity Index |
|---|---|
| Mar 28, 2026 | 60.5 |
| Mar 29, 2026 | 61.9 |
| Mar 30, 2026 | 60.0 |
| Mar 31, 2026 | 61.4 |
| Apr 1, 2026 | 61.5 |
| Apr 2, 2026 | 64.4 |
| Apr 3, 2026 | 61.5 |
Source: Cloudflare Radar
Why track Feedly traffic?
Identify and classify unknown crawler activity. Feedly may appear in your live traffic data with varying frequency. Tracking its behavior helps you decide whether to allow, throttle, or block it based on actual data.
Protect your crawl budget. Every bot request consumes server resources. Understanding what Feedly crawls helps you prioritize the crawlers that matter.
Log Verification
To verify Feedly traffic in your live traffic data:
- Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
- Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Feedly)
- Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
- Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available
Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.
Undocumented Information
The following information is not officially documented for Feedly:
- ai-training-capable
- verified-ips
- high-volume
- deprecated
- JavaScript rendering
Official Documentation
View Official Feedly Documentation →
Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.