Twitterbot
Twitterbot is a single-page fetcher operated by X. 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 Twitterbot 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 Twitterbot 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
X runs 2 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
2- TwitterbotYou are here
- X-Bot
Share of AI bot traffic
1.9%
↓ 21% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
1.2%
↑ 100% 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 Twitterbot's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
12 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~83 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Should I let Twitterbot 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 Twitterbot affect my Google rankings?
No. Twitterbot 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 Twitterbot?
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 Twitterbot", not "the traffic is genuinely Twitterbot". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for X to publish IP ranges.
What breaks if I block Twitterbot?
Link previews, embeds, and unfurls on whatever surface Twitterbot feeds will stop rendering. Users sharing your URLs into X will see a bare link instead of a rich card. Usually that's the first thing people regret blocking.
How is Twitterbot different from X's other bots?
X 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 X family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Twitterbot?
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.