What is NewsBlur?
NewsBlur is a web crawler that fetches RSS feeds and web content for its personal news reader service, collecting articles from subscribed websites and blogs to deliver real-time updates to users' newsfeeds. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when NewsBlur visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | NewsBlur Favicon Fetcher - 1751 subscribers - https://www.newsblur.com/site/9284864/the-atlantic ("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/147.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/147.0.0.0") |
| Operated By | NewsBlur |
| Triggered By | Shared link |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
Why Is NewsBlur Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. NewsBlur fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.
Should I Block NewsBlur?
Usually not. Blocking NewsBlur may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for NewsBlur.
Insights for NewsBlur
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
NewsBlur Traffic
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From NewsBlur?
NewsBlur usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
Does NewsBlur Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. NewsBlur is not expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Is NewsBlur Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. NewsBlur is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking NewsBlur Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. NewsBlur's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does NewsBlur Access Private Content?
No. NewsBlur has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
How Can I Verify a Request From NewsBlur?
Agent Analytics tracks NewsBlur visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "NewsBlur". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because NewsBlur does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
How Is NewsBlur Different From Other NewsBlur Agents?
NewsBlur operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- NewsBlur Feed Fetcher: NewsBlur Feed Fetcher is the bot used by NewsBlur, an RSS feed reader service, to retrieve and update content from RSS and Atom feeds that users have subscribed to. The b…
- NewsBlur Page Fetcher: NewsBlur Page Fetcher is a bot operated by NewsBlur, an RSS feed reader and news aggregation service. It fetches content from websites on behalf of subscribers, with the …