Overcast Feed Crawler
VerifiableThe server-side feed crawler of the Overcast podcast app. Overcast fetches each podcast's RSS feed centrally rather than from every listener's device, at intervals from a few minutes to 24 hours depending on the show's popularity, and reports the show's Overcast subscriber count in its User-Agent. Standard HTTP caching headers are obeyed. Note that Overcast's iOS and Apple Watch apps send their own Overcast User-Agents when downloading episode audio, but those requests come from listeners' own devices rather than from Overcast's crawlers, so they are outside the hostnames this entry verifies.
Operated by Overcast Radio, LLC · Official documentation
User agents
Patterns this directory matches, with real observed strings.
- regexOvercast/[\d.]+ Podcast Sync
- observedOvercast/1.0 Podcast Sync (123 subscribers; feed-id=456789; +http://overcast.fm/)
How to verify
Reverse-DNS check a client IP
dig -x <client-ip> +short # expect a hostname matching *.overcast.fm Reverse-DNS suffixes: *.overcast.fm
Good Bot Practices scorecard
- Identifies honestly
Stable UA token documented (1 pattern)
- Verifiable
Verifiable
- Respects robots.txt
Does not honor robots.txt
- Behaves
Crawl-rate behavior is operator-declared; not machine-verifiable from this dataset
- Reachable operator
Operator and documentation published
Measured against the Good Bot Practices.