Google Feedfetcher
Google's fetcher for RSS and Atom feeds that users have subscribed to through Google products.
FeedFetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)Official documentation: developers.google.com
See what Google Feedfetcher sees on your site → try Peekabot, free
What Google Feedfetcher does
Feedfetcher grabs RSS and Atom feeds for Google products like Google News and Discover follows. It only fetches feeds after a user has explicitly subscribed, and Google documents that it ignores robots.txt on the reasoning that it acts as the user's agent, not as a crawler. On a WordPress site you'll typically see it hitting /feed/.
Why it visits your site
Someone follows your site or feed through a Google product, and Feedfetcher checks periodically for new posts. More requests generally means more subscribers.
The bigger picture: utility & developer tools
This category is the honest miscellany of a server log: monitoring services, platform callbacks, and the default user agents of HTTP libraries. The unifying rule is that the string identifies software, not intent. A curl request might be your host's health check or a vulnerability probe; a python-requests hit might be a researcher or a scraper; a WordPress UA is one site talking to another. Reading these names as a threat list misses what they actually are - a census of the scripted web touching your site, most of it mundane, some of it yours.
robots.txt barely applies here, and not out of rudeness: monitors fetch the exact URL a customer configured, feed fetchers act on a user's subscription, and bare libraries simply ship with no robots logic at all. Blocking a default library UA filters the honest and the lazy while the malicious change one line and continue, so the effective levers are different - rate limiting by IP, watching which paths get requested, and reserving blocks for named services you can verify and have decided you don't want.
Should you block it?
Almost certainly not - these hits represent real readers, and every WordPress site publishes feeds by default. A robots.txt rule won't work anyway; per Google's own docs, the only way to stop Feedfetcher is to serve it a 404 or 410 at the server level.
Block via robots.txt
Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask Google Feedfetcher to stay away:
User-agent: FeedFetcher-Google Disallow: /
Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.
How to see Google Feedfetcher traffic on your site
You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Google Feedfetcher request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because Google Feedfetcher doesn't run scripts.
Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Google Feedfetcher and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.