Pinterestbot: what it is and how to block or allow it

What Pinterestbot does

Pinterestbot visits public sites to collect content and metadata for Pins that send traffic back to them. It also re-checks pages to keep Pin details up to date and to find broken links.

• Crawl-delay is honored up to 1; larger values count as 1, and a longer delay takes a request to Pinterest. Source

Does Pinterestbot follow robots.txt?

Yes. Pinterest says Pinterestbot respects robots.txt and honors requests to stop or limit crawling. It reads robots.txt only on your main domain, not on subdomains.

It honors Crawl-delay, so you can slow it down instead of blocking it.

How to block or allow Pinterestbot

Block it from the whole site:

User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /

Keep it out of one folder only:

User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /private/

Slow it down instead, with a pause in seconds between requests:

User-agent: Pinterestbot
Crawl-delay: 10

A crawler that finds a group with its own name follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. If your * group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines in the Pinterestbot group. robots.txt works per host, so add the rules to each subdomain you want covered.

Test the result with the robots.txt checker, or write a new file with the robots.txt generator.

What blocking Pinterestbot changes

Pinterestbot stops crawling the blocked paths, which can leave Pins from your site with stale details.

Where to see Pinterestbot visits

Most bots never appear in Google Analytics. Many don't run JavaScript, so the analytics tag never loads, and Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders. Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent, so search them for the bot's name.

OneLence recognizes Pinterestbot and keeps it out of your visitor counts. With Premium, bot traffic shows which bots visit your site, how often and what kind they are.