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.
Overview
| Operated By | NewsBlur |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | September 15, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
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.
NewsBlur's User Agent
| User Agent | NewsBlur Content Fetcher - 1734 subscribers - https://www.newsblur.com/site/640608/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") |
How To Block NewsBlur With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that NewsBlur not access your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to request the same of all fetchers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: NewsBlur # https://knownagents.com/agents/newsblur
Disallow: /Insights for NewsBlur
As of September 15, 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 Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
7% of top websites block NewsBlur in their robots.txts.
Overall Fetcher Traffic
1.8% of all web traffic came from fetchers.
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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.
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 Tell if NewsBlur Is Visiting My Website?
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.
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.