What is Pinterestbot?
It crawls public websites to index content on Pinterest, keeps Pin details such as price and title up to date, and finds broken links behind Pins. Pinterest says this content is not used to train its image generation model, Pinterest Canvas.
Fetches a page when someone shares its link, to draw the preview card. Blocking it breaks your previews in that app.
Pinterest only reads robots.txt on your main domain, not on subdomains, and treats any Crawl-delay above 1 as 1. Its US crawling comes from 54.236.1.x.
Pinterestbot user agent
Pinterest documents these user agents for Pinterestbot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Pinterest/0.2 (+https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)Should you block Pinterestbot?
Allow it. Blocking it breaks the preview card when someone shares your link.
How to block Pinterestbot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Pinterestbot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in pinterest.com or pinterestcrawler.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when Pinterestbot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Pinterest’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.