I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their lon

I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.