What Pinterestbot does
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's web crawler. It indexes public website content, collecting image, title, description, price, and availability for product Pins, while article pages show only previews. It also keeps Pin metadata current, checks the pages behind Pins to detect and remove broken links, and helps fight spam. Pinterest states that content crawled by Pinterestbot is not used to train its image generation foundation model, Pinterest Canvas.
How to control Pinterestbot
Target Pinterestbot in your robots.txt with the Pinterestbot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Pinterestbot
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Allow: /Block Pinterestbot
User-agent: Pinterestbot
Disallow: /Genuine Pinterestbot traffic can be verified with a reverse DNS lookup returning a hostname ending in pinterest.com or pinterestcrawler.com, confirmed by a forward DNS lookup back to the original IP.
How to identify Pinterestbot
Temso identifies Pinterestbottraffic 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.
PinterestbotPinterestbot FAQ
What is Pinterestbot?
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's crawler. It fetches public pages to populate Pin details, such as image, title, description, price, and availability for products, and to keep Pin metadata current and detect broken links.
How do I block Pinterestbot?
Add a robots.txt group with User-agent: Pinterestbot and Disallow: / (or disallow specific paths). Note that Pinterest reads robots.txt on main domains only, not subdomains, and while it supports allow, disallow, and crawl-delay directives, crawl-delay values above 1 second are capped at 1 second.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
