Bot directoryCategory

Social Media Bots Directory

Social media crawlers fetching Open Graph metadata for link previews.

Open the AI crawler checkerBuild a robots.txt

These fetch your page when someone shares a link, to build the preview card. Block them and shared links lose their title and image.
  • 9tokens
  • 9safe
  • 0caution
  • 0aggressive

All 9 Social Media Bots

The social preview bots category in numbers

Our database lists 9 social preview bots from 6 operators. 9 are rated safe, 0 caution and 0 aggressive. What they are for:

social preview bots by purpose
PurposeCrawlers
fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it8
checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service1

Priority tiers

How the 9 social preview bots spread across our six priority tiers, where Tier 1 is what you would notice losing:

  • Tier 4: 1 crawler
  • Tier 5: 8 crawlers

None of the social preview bots reach Tier 1 or 2, so decisions in this category rarely decide your visibility. They are mostly about load, data use and privacy.

How to review social preview bots on your site

  1. List the ones that matter. Start with Tier 1 and 2 in the table above; the rest can usually follow a default.
  2. Choose a default. Decide what User-agent: * should say, because every crawler you do not name follows it.
  3. Name the exceptions. Give each crawler that needs a different answer its own group, and repeat any shared Disallow lines inside it.
  4. Check the edge. Firewalls and bot managers often treat these crawlers differently from robots.txt. Run the AI crawler tester to see both layers together.
Test yourself: a crawler in this category is not named anywhere in your robots.txt. Which rules does it follow?

The User-agent: * group. If there is no such group, it may crawl everything.

Test yourself: does a safety rating of "safe" mean you should allow a crawler?

Not necessarily. Safety describes behaviour. Whether to allow it depends on what it does with your content and what you lose by blocking it.

The social preview bots worth knowing first

Ranked by priority tier, these are the social preview bots with the biggest effect on a typical site:

  • Meta-ExternalAds (Meta, Tier 4): a utility crawler that checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service.
  • FacebookBot (Meta, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • facebookexternalhit (Meta, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • LinkedInBot (LinkedIn, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • Pinterestbot (Pinterest, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • Quora-Bot (Quora, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • Slackbot (Slack, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.
  • Slackbot-LinkExpanding (Slack, Tier 5): a utility crawler that fetches a page to build a link preview when someone shares it.

Related: how AI engines choose their sources

Of the 9 social preview bots we track, 2 are documented as following robots.txt, 0 as not following it for some requests, 0 with exceptions or disputed behaviour, and 7 with no clear statement from the operator. Where behaviour is unclear, back a robots.txt rule with a server-side one.

What to do with social preview bots, by type of site

Recommended approach to social preview bots by type of site
If you run...Recommended approach
Site that uses this kind of serviceAllow the crawlers for services you actually use; they need access to work.
Site that does not use the serviceBlocking is low risk; it has little effect on search or AI visibility.
Site under heavy bot loadRate-limit or block the noisiest crawlers first.
Privacy-sensitive siteBlock crawlers whose data use you have not reviewed.

Common mistakes with social preview bots

The errors we see most often with social preview bots in the files and firewalls we test:

  1. Treating social preview bots as an AI or search crawler. Blocking it has little effect on visibility; decide based on load and what it does with your data.
  2. Relying on robots.txt alone when social preview bots is rated caution or aggressive. Back the rule with a server-side block.
  3. Blocking social preview bots by IP alone. Ranges change; match the token and verify with logs.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check social preview bots from outside after every change.

Spotting social preview bots in your logs

robots.txt says what Meta-ExternalAds and FacebookBot and facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot and Pinterestbot and Quora-Bot may do; your access logs show what they actually did.

Count requests

On a server with standard Nginx or Apache logs, this counts matching requests per day (adjust the log path for your host):

grep -iE "Meta-ExternalAds|FacebookBot|facebookexternalhit|LinkedInBot|Pinterestbot|Quora-Bot" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c

And this shows which paths it requested most, which is the quickest way to see whether your Disallow lines are being respected:

grep -iE "Meta-ExternalAds|FacebookBot|facebookexternalhit|LinkedInBot|Pinterestbot|Quora-Bot" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

Check the requests are genuine

Anyone can send these user-agents, so confirm the source before acting on a match:

  • Meta-ExternalAds: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable Meta-ExternalAds request with caution. Check it separately from FacebookBot and facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot and Pinterestbot and Quora-Bot.
  • FacebookBot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable FacebookBot request with caution. Check it separately from Meta-ExternalAds and facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot and Pinterestbot and Quora-Bot.
  • facebookexternalhit: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable facebookexternalhit request with caution. Check it separately from Meta-ExternalAds and FacebookBot and LinkedInBot and Pinterestbot and Quora-Bot.
  • LinkedInBot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable LinkedInBot request with caution. Check it separately from Meta-ExternalAds and FacebookBot and facebookexternalhit and Pinterestbot and Quora-Bot.
  • Pinterestbot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable Pinterestbot request with caution. Check it separately from Meta-ExternalAds and FacebookBot and facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot and Quora-Bot.
  • Quora-Bot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where social preview bots documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable Quora-Bot request with caution. Check it separately from Meta-ExternalAds and FacebookBot and facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot and Pinterestbot.

Recent changes among social preview bots

The newest social preview bots in our database: Slackbot-LinkExpanding (September 22, 2026), Meta-ExternalAds (September 22, 2026), Twitterbot (March 17, 2026), Slackbot (March 17, 2026), Quora-Bot (March 17, 2026), Pinterestbot (March 17, 2026). A User-agent: * default decides what each of these gets until you name it.

Related: writing content AI engines can cite

None of the 9 social preview bots is in our tracked token set yet, so we report first-seen dates only.

How top sites treat social preview bots

From our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 (5,583 valid files, fetched October 20, 2026):

None of the tokens for social preview bots is tracked by name in our study. For scale, 20.1% of top-site files block at least one AI training crawler and 4.3% refuse every unnamed crawler with User-agent: * and Disallow: /, which would catch social preview bots too.

More questions about social preview bots

How many social preview bots should I name in robots.txt?
Only the ones that need a different answer from your default. Every crawler you do not name follows User-agent: *, so a short file with a sensible default is easier to maintain than a long list.
Do new social preview bots appear often?
Yes. New crawlers launch every month, which is why a deliberate User-agent: * default matters: it decides what happens to crawlers you have never heard of.
Can I copy another site's rules for social preview bots?
Use them as a pattern, not a template. Each file reflects that site's licensing and infrastructure. Copy the structure, then name the crawlers that matter to you.
Where do I check how my site treats social preview bots?
Run the AI bot checker. It reports every crawler in this category in one pass, including firewall refusals that robots.txt never shows.

FAQ

How many Social Media Bots are tracked?
We currently track 9 Social Media Bots with user-agent strings, safety ratings, and blocking rules.
Which Social Media Bots should I never block?
Never block bots with 'critical' impact rating - there are 0 in this category. Blocking them removes your site from their search results.
Are all Social Media Bots safe?
Out of 9 bots in this category: 9 safe, 0 caution, 0 aggressive.
How do I block all Social Media Bots at once?
Generate a combined robots.txt block rule for all Social Media Bots using our bulk robots.txt generator, or manually list each User-agent + Disallow: / directive.
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