SimplePie

What is SimplePie?

About

SimplePie is a fetcher operated by SimplePie. If you think this is incorrect or can provide additional detail about its purpose, please contact us. You can see how often SimplePie 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	SimplePie
Last Updated	20 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0% of top websites are blocking SimplePie

Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States

SimplePie normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Top Visited Website Categories

Food and Drink

News

Hobbies and Leisure

Sports

Finance

Get These Insights for Your Website

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Robots.txt

Should I Block SimplePie?

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 SimplePie?

⚠️ 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 SimplePie 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 SimplePie/1.5.1 (Feed Parser; http://simplepie.org; Allow like Gecko) Build/20250722003531

# robots.txt
# This should block SimplePie

User-agent: SimplePie
Disallow: /