What SnapURLPreviewBot does
Snap's URL Preview Service scans a page's HTML to generate the preview card, with title, subtitle, and thumbnail, shown when a URL is shared in Snapchat's chat feature. It prioritizes Open Graph tags (og:title and og:image) and falls back to X/Twitter Card tags (twitter:title and twitter:img:src) when Open Graph data is unavailable. It identifies itself with the user agent "Snap URL Preview Service; bot; snapchat; https://developers.snap.com/robots". To avoid excess traffic, it caches responses to a URL for 30 minutes.
How to identify SnapURLPreviewBot
Temso identifies SnapURLPreviewBottraffic 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.
Snap URL Preview ServiceSnapURLPreviewBot FAQ
What is SnapURLPreviewBot?
SnapURLPreviewBot is Snap's URL Preview Service, which fetches a page's HTML to build the title, subtitle, and thumbnail preview card shown when a link is shared in Snapchat chat. It reads Open Graph tags first and falls back to X/Twitter Card tags, and it caches responses to a URL for 30 minutes.
Can I block SnapURLPreviewBot with robots.txt?
Snap's documentation does not list a robots.txt token or state whether the service honors robots.txt; it is a preview fetcher that acts on URLs users share in Snapchat chat rather than a crawler that discovers pages on its own. If you need to block it, filter requests matching its user agent, "Snap URL Preview Service; bot; snapchat; https://developers.snap.com/robots", at the server 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.
