Directory / Feed fetchers

Overcast Feed Crawler

Verifiable

The 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.