What is Twitterbot?
Twitterbot is the crawler X uses to read card markup when a link is shared, so the post can show a title, description and image. X caches the result for 7 days.
- Operator
- X
- Purpose
- Fetches card markup when a link is shared on X.
- robots.txt token
Twitterbot- How to verify
- X publishes no IP list or reverse DNS domain for Twitterbot.
- Operator documentation
- https://developer.x.com/en/docs/x-for-websites/cards/guides/getting-started
- Last verified
How often is Twitterbot impersonated?
Other apps also put "Twitterbot" in their user agent, so a request carrying the name is not always a claim to be X's bot. We show no share.
This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 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 Twitterbot? Check its IP address.
Should you block Twitterbot?
- Allow it if
- people share your pages on X.
- Block it if
- you do not want preview cards on X.
- What blocking changes
- Links to your pages shared on X lose their preview card.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. X says Twitterbot respects robots.txt. If a page or its image is blocked, no card or thumbnail is shown.
User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Twitterbot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
- Discordbot (Discord): Visits a link shared in a Discord message to build its preview.
- facebookexternalhit (Meta): Builds link previews when content is shared on Meta's apps.
- Pinterestbot (Pinterest): Indexes pages behind Pins and keeps Pin details up to date.
- Slackbot-LinkExpanding (Slack): Fetches a page's meta tags when someone posts its link in Slack.
See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.
Request a site audit