What is Pinterestbot?
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's crawler. It indexes public pages to drive traffic back to them, keeps Pin details such as price and title up to date, and detects broken links behind Pins.
Last verified 2026-09-30 against the operator's documentation. All bots
Pinterestbot at a glance
- Operator
- Type
- Link preview bots
- Purpose
- Indexes pages behind Pins and keeps Pin details up to date.
- robots.txt token
Pinterestbot- Example user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)- How to verify
- Run a reverse DNS lookup and check that the name ends in pinterest.com or pinterestcrawler.com, then confirm with a forward lookup.
- Reverse DNS
- pinterest.com, pinterestcrawler.com
- Operator documentation
- https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/pinterest-crawler
How often is Pinterestbot impersonated?
For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be Pinterestbot failed verification.
Measured between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.
This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.
Have a request that claims to be Pinterestbot? Check its IP address.
Should you block Pinterestbot?
- Allow it if
- people save your pages to Pinterest.
- Block it if
- Pinterest sends you no visitors and the crawl adds load.
- What blocking changes
- Pins that link to your pages stop being refreshed and checked.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Pinterest says Pinterestbot respects robots.txt and honors Crawl-delay up to 1 second.
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Pinterestbot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Pinterestbot: common questions
See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.
What is Pinterestbot?
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's crawler. It indexes public pages to drive traffic back to them, keeps Pin details such as price and title up to date, and detects broken links behind Pins.
How do I verify that a request is really Pinterestbot?
Run a reverse DNS lookup and check that the name ends in pinterest.com or pinterestcrawler.com, then confirm with a forward lookup. The user agent alone proves nothing: any client can send it.
How do I block Pinterestbot in robots.txt?
Add a group for User-agent: Pinterestbot with Disallow: /. Pinterest says Pinterestbot respects robots.txt and honors Crawl-delay up to 1 second. robots.txt only asks. A client that ignores it, or pretends to be Pinterestbot, has to be stopped at your edge.
What happens if I block Pinterestbot?
Pins that link to your pages stop being refreshed and checked.
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