Pinterestbot
Pinterestbot is a single-page fetcher operated by Pinterest. It fetches one page (or a small set) when triggered by a user action, typically a link being shared on social media, a messaging app, or an RSS reader.
Volume tracks shares and clicks rather than crawl schedules. A trending link can produce a sudden spike, but Pinterestbot will not crawl the rest of your site.
Blocking it usually means the link previews on the corresponding platform stop showing your title, image, and description.
See Pinterestbot on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
User-Agent only
Crawl frequency
Per user action
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Varies
Pinterest runs 2 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
1- PinterestbotYou are here
Shopping Bot
1Share of AI bot traffic
1.1%
↑ 22% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
0.90%
↑ 80% vs 12 mo ago
Top page categories crawled
Link Unfurlers as a category, share of all bot traffic
15%
↑ 3% vs 12 mo ago
Sum of every link unfurler we have public stats on. Compare to Pinterestbot's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
14 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~71 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Should I let Pinterestbot through?
In most cases, yes. Fetchers power link previews and feed readers. Blocking breaks the user experience on social and messaging platforms. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Pinterestbot affect my Google rankings?
No. Pinterestbot is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from Pinterestbot?
Look at the User-Agent header in your access logs and match it against the strings listed above. Worth knowing that the User-Agent is easy to fake, so this check tells you "the traffic claims to be Pinterestbot", not "the traffic is genuinely Pinterestbot". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Pinterest to publish IP ranges.
What breaks if I block Pinterestbot?
Link previews, embeds, and unfurls on whatever surface Pinterestbot feeds will stop rendering. Users sharing your URLs into Pinterest will see a bare link instead of a rich card. Usually that's the first thing people regret blocking.
How is Pinterestbot different from Pinterest's other bots?
Pinterest splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Pinterest family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Pinterestbot?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.