What Iframely does
Iframely is a metadata fetcher operated as a service for social apps and news publishers; it requests a page when a user shares its URL in an app that uses Iframely's backend. It extracts the title, description, and thumbnail by parsing Open Graph, Twitter Cards, oEmbed, and Google structured data, and for media files it uses HEAD requests or HTTP Range headers to read only the first few bytes. Iframely states it is not a crawler: it does not follow links and only acts on behalf of a human. Freshly shared URLs may be re-fetched as often as once per hour on the first day, tapering to about once per month as content ages, and cached content is purged after three months of inactivity.
How to identify Iframely
Temso identifies Iframelytraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
Iframely\/Iframely FAQ
What is Iframely?
Iframely is a metadata-fetching service used by social apps and news publishers to generate rich link previews; it requests a page only when a human shares its URL in a customer app and extracts the title, description, and thumbnail. Its user agent is Iframely/1.3.1 (+https://iframely.com/docs/about).
Can I block Iframely with robots.txt?
Iframely's documentation describes the agent as not a crawler, since it does not follow links and only fetches URLs a human has shared, and it does not state any robots.txt support. To control its access, use the IPv4 and IPv6 address lists Iframely publishes, or match its Iframely user agent at the server or firewall level.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
