NewsBlur

What is NewsBlur?

About

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 see how often NewsBlur visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Agent Type

Fetcher

Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Expected Behavior

Fetchers retrieve metadata from web pages to generate link previews in social media platforms, messaging apps, and content aggregators. They're triggered on-demand when users share or post links, fetching information like titles, descriptions, and thumbnail images. Traffic is unpredictable and correlates with how often your content is shared. Viral content may trigger thousands of fetcher requests in a short period. Fetchers typically access only the shared URL rather than crawling your site.

Detail

Operated By	NewsBlur
Last Updated	13 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0% of top websites are blocking NewsBlur

Learn How →

Country of Origin

Finland

NewsBlur normally visits from Finland

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Top Visited Website Categories

Science

Books and Literature

Arts and Entertainment

Games

Internet and Telecom

How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?

Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.

Set Up Agent Analytics →

Robots.txt

Should I Block NewsBlur?

Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.

How Do I Block NewsBlur?

You can block NewsBlur or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

How Do I Block All Fetchers?

Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new fetchers automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt →

User Agent String NewsBlur Feed Fetcher - 2 subscribers - https://www.newsblur.com/site/5507657/first-things ("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Safari/605.1.15")

# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: NewsBlur # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/newsblur
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.