What is FlipboardRSS?
FlipboardRSS is a web crawler used by Flipboard to discover articles from RSS feeds and generate article summaries for content curation on the Flipboard platform. It fetches and processes RSS content to help build personalized magazines. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
FlipboardRSS usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
FlipboardRSS's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FlipboardRSS/1.2; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy) |
How To Block FlipboardRSS With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that FlipboardRSS not access your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to request the same of all fetchers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: FlipboardRSS # https://knownagents.com/agents/flipboardrss
Disallow: /Global Statistics for FlipboardRSS
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
0% of top websites block FlipboardRSS in their robots.txt files.
Overall Fetcher Traffic
2.6% of all web traffic came from fetchers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by FlipboardRSS.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block FlipboardRSS?
Usually not. Blocking FlipboardRSS may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. Almost none of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for FlipboardRSS.
Does FlipboardRSS Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. FlipboardRSS is not expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Does FlipboardRSS Access Private Content?
No. FlipboardRSS has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
Why Is FlipboardRSS Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. FlipboardRSS fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.
How Can I Tell if FlipboardRSS Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks FlipboardRSS visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "FlipboardRSS". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because FlipboardRSS does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.