Pinterestbot user agent
Operated by Pinterest
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's crawler that indexes public pages and keeps Pin details such as price and title up to date.
The Pinterestbot bot at a glance
- Pinterestbot is operated by Pinterest and crawls web pages for a search engine index, and reads page titles, descriptions and images to build link previews.
- The robots.txt token for Pinterestbot is Pinterestbot.
- Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings.
- Pinterestbot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is Pinterestbot?
Pinterestbot visits public websites to index their content and send traffic back from Pins. It also checks that Pin details are current and removes broken links behind Pins.
Pinterest states that Pinterestbot respects requests to stop or limit crawling.
Should you block Pinterestbot?
Allow Pinterestbot unless it causes a measurable load problem.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | No direct effect on AI answers, but shared links lose their title, image and description, which usually lowers clicks from social and chat apps. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow Pinterestbot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token Pinterestbot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block Pinterestbot
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Pinterestbot
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Pinterestbot out of private areas only
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Pinterestbot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Pinterestbot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Pinterestbot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Pinterestbot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Pinterestbot")How to verify real Pinterestbot traffic
Pinterest publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Pinterestbot, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find Pinterestbot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Pinterestbot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Pinterestbot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
Pinterestbot user agent string
The full user agent Pinterest publishes for Pinterestbot. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +http://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)Pinterestbot FAQ
Pinterestbot identifies itself with the robots.txt token "Pinterestbot". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +http://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Yes. Pinterest states that Pinterestbot follows robots.txt rules written for the "Pinterestbot" token.
Blocking a social preview bot has no effect on search rankings. No direct effect on AI answers, but shared links lose their title, image and description, which usually lowers clicks from social and chat apps.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: Pinterestbot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Pinterest publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Pinterestbot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Pinterestbot", for example with: grep -i "Pinterestbot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Pinterest crawler documentation. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
