Readbird fetcher
Readbird is a news and RSS reader. Many feeds contain only a teaser, so when a reader opens an article, our server downloads that one page and shows the article text inside the app — the same page the reader would otherwise open in a browser.
What it downloads
Only article pages linked from feeds our readers subscribe to, or links a reader saves. It does not follow links, crawl sites, or download pages nobody asked for.
Most requests come from a reader opening an article. The app may also load a few articles in advance, shortly before the reader is likely to open them — limited to 20 per 10 minutes per device.
A downloaded article is cached, so other readers of the same article do not cause new requests.
What it respects
noarchive / nocache (meta robots or X-Robots-Tag): the text is shown to the reader but not stored. noindex: the text is not added to search.
Paywalls are not bypassed: if a page is not available to us, the reader gets a link to open it on your site.
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Readbird/1.0; +https://readbird.app/bot)
Verification (Web Bot Auth)
Requests are signed with HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421, tag "web-bot-auth", Ed25519). The Signature-Agent header points to readbird.app; our public keys are published here: https://readbird.app/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
Contact
Problems with our fetcher, or want it to stay away from your site? Write to us: support@readbird.app