FeedFetcher-Google

Safe Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: No

Google feed fetcher used for RSS and Atom retrieval for Google News and WebSub.

Key facts

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Purpose: User Triggered
User-Agent: FeedFetcher-Google
Should you block it?: Depends
Verified: Yes
Respects robots.txt: No
Identity type: Official Documented
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: FeedFetcher-Google
robots.txt token: FeedFetcher-Google
HTTP user-agent: FeedFetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)
Aliases: Google feed fetcher

Ownership

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Type: Search
Purpose: User Triggered

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Verification: Verify as a Google fetcher using reverse DNS and Google's published user-triggered fetcher IP ranges.
IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/user-triggered-fetchers-google.json
Operator URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
Source URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/feedfetcher

Blocking and detection

Robots

Serve a 404 or 410 response to FeedFetcher-Google requests if you need to stop feed retrieval.

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "FeedFetcher-Google")

Advanced server rules

Apache

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} FeedFetcher\-Google [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "FeedFetcher-Google") { return 403; }

Notes

FeedFetcher-Google is Google’s feed fetcher for RSS and Atom feeds used by Google News and WebSub. Google says it behaves as a direct agent of the human user and generally ignores robots.txt, recommending server-side error responses if you want to stop it.

Evidence and source

Verify as a Google fetcher using reverse DNS and Google's published user-triggered fetcher IP ranges.

https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/feedfetcher