What is 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 user agent number indicating how many users are subscribed to that feed. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | NewsBlur |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | July 12, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
NewsBlur Page Fetcher shows up within seconds of someone sharing one of your URLs, grabs the title, description, and preview image, and leaves. Expect one hit per share, no link following, and volume that tracks how much your content circulates. A widely shared link can mean thousands of fetches in an hour.
NewsBlur Page Fetcher's User Agent
| User Agent | NewsBlur Page Fetcher - 1701 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 Page Fetcher With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that NewsBlur Page Fetcher 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 Page Fetcher # https://knownagents.com/agents/newsblur-page-fetcher
Disallow: /Global Insights for NewsBlur Page Fetcher
As of July 12, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
0% of top websites block NewsBlur Page Fetcher in their robots.txt files.
Overall Fetcher Traffic
4.0% of all web traffic came from fetchers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by NewsBlur Page Fetcher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block NewsBlur Page Fetcher?
No. NewsBlur Page Fetcher builds the link preview that appears when someone shares your page in a chat or social feed. Blocking it turns those shares into bare links with no title or image, which fewer people click. Its traffic normally follows sharing activity rather than a crawl schedule, so if it ever starts crawling at volume, rate limit it instead of blocking it. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for NewsBlur Page Fetcher right now.
Does NewsBlur Page Fetcher Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. NewsBlur Page Fetcher is not expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule only states your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then confirm in Agent Analytics that its requests actually stop.
Does NewsBlur Page Fetcher Access Private Content?
It cannot. NewsBlur Page Fetcher loads only the exact URL someone shared, reads the title, description, and preview image, and leaves. It has no credentials and does not follow links to other pages.
Why Is NewsBlur Page Fetcher Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. NewsBlur Page Fetcher fetched it once to build the preview card, and every new share can trigger another fetch, so spikes mean your content is spreading.
How Can I Tell if NewsBlur Page Fetcher Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks NewsBlur Page Fetcher visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "NewsBlur Page Fetcher". Look for hits on single pages moments after someone shares a link, with no crawling afterward. Keep in mind that NewsBlur Page Fetcher doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.