OpenRSS

What is OpenRSS?

About

OpenRSS is a nonprofit RSS feed service bot that crawls websites to generate and provide free RSS feeds, allowing users to follow website updates in a reader app. You can see how often OpenRSS visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.

Type

Fetcher
Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By OpenRSS
Last Updated 10 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0%
0% of top websites are blocking OpenRSS
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
OpenRSS normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

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Robots.txt

Should I Block OpenRSS?

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 OpenRSS?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block OpenRSS 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.

User Agent String OpenRSS/202507.20.1254 (https://openrss.org/guides/why-is-open-rss-scraping-my-website) 
# robots.txt
# This should block OpenRSS

User-agent: OpenRSS
Disallow: /

References