Feedly bot

The Feedly bot is the official web crawler for Feedly, a widely used news aggregator and RSS reader service. It functions as a content aggregator, collecting updates from RSS and Atom feeds that users have subscribed to. The bot identifies itself in server logs with a user-agent string like Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; like FeedFetcher-Google). Unlike general-purpose web crawlers that index entire sites, the Feedly bot specifically targets syndicated content feeds to deliver timely updates to its users.

The Feedly bot is crawling your site because one or more Feedly users have subscribed to your content via your RSS or Atom feed. When you publish new content, the bot detects and fetches these updates to display them to your subscribers within their Feedly interface. This is a normal and authorized form of content syndication. The frequency of its visits is determined by the number of your followers on Feedly and how often you publish new content. Its presence is a direct reflection of user interest in your site.

The primary purpose of the Feedly bot is to provide a centralized and organized reading experience for its users, who can consume content from multiple sources in a single interface. For website owners and content creators, Feedly serves as a valuable distribution channel. It helps extend your content's reach to a dedicated audience that prefers to consume information through feed readers, which can lead to more consistent readership and drive engaged traffic back to your site when users click through to read full articles.

If you wish to prevent the Feedly bot from accessing your content feeds, you can add a rule to your robots.txt file. Note that this will stop Feedly users from receiving updates from your site.

To block the Feedly bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file. The user-agent is case-sensitive.

User-agent: Feedly
Disallow: /