Why does Inoreader fetch my feed, and how often?

Inoreader fetches your feed because at least one Inoreader user follows it, once for all of them. How often depends on how much the feed publishes and who follows it, from every 30 minutes for a busy feed, or every 10 minutes when a reader boosts it, to once a week after a year of silence.

Recognize the fetcher

Requests come from the addresses in Inoreader's IP list. The user agent starts with "Inoreader/1.0" and says how many Inoreader readers follow the feed. Every check sends the server's ETag and Last-Modified values back, so a 304 answer costs no body. A failed fetch may be retried from another address or through a browser.

The check schedule

A feed that published in the last 30 days is checked by its pace: 30 or more posts a month mean a check every 30 minutes to 2 hours, 10 to 29 every 2 hours, 5 to 9 every 3 hours and 1 to 4 every 4 hours. A feed with fewer than 3 active readers is checked about half as often, never more than hourly.

A feed a Pro or Team user follows is checked at least every hour, and a boosted feed every 10 minutes. After 30 days without a post the checks drop to once a day, after a year to once a week, until the next post. A feed nobody actively reads isn't checked at all. The feed's ttl, sy:updatePeriod and Cache-Control values and robots.txt don't change the schedule.

When the feed declares a WebSub hub, Inoreader subscribes there, new posts arrive within seconds and the feed is checked only every 3 to 18 hours as a fallback. WebSub for publishers explains the setup.

Failed checks

Each failed check doubles the wait before the next one, down to once a day after 30 days without a post and once a week after a year, for as long as anyone follows the feed. A 404 or 410 answer is never retried elsewhere.

See the schedule for a feed

Check the feed in the feed validator: its Updates section shows the interval in words and the last 48 hours of checks. Feed analytics shows the Check interval on its Delivery card.

Opt out or move the feed

To keep Inoreader out of your feed, answer requests whose user agent contains "Inoreader/1.0" with 404 or 410, or contact us to stop a whole domain. When the feed moves, answer the old address with a 301, which Inoreader remembers for good. The Inoreader fetcher page shows how to allow the fetcher, a verified bot, in Cloudflare.

The schedule applies whatever your plan: the readers' plans set the pace, with the hourly check from Pro and Team readers and boosts from Pro.