To help people discover and do what they love, we're creating a database of billions of Pins on Pinterest. In order to protect our users and provide the highest quality content, we use web crawlers to help us identify the data on the pages behind the Pins.
These pages contain rich signals that enable us to infer better recommendations, fight spam, and display useful information. To take full advantage of these signals, we regularly fetch, store, and process page content associated with Pins.
How Pinterest accesses your site
When a genuine Pinterest crawler visits your website, it will send a valid Pinterest User-Agent and connect from a network operated by Pinterest.
Pinterest crawler respects the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) and is configured to rate limit concurrent requests made to your site. Don't hard code these network's IP addresses in your site configuration, because the addresses that the crawler uses can change without notice.
Pinterest's user agent is:
Pinterest/0.2 (+https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)Pinterest's IP is dynamic and and changes frequently, but will always be in the range of: 54.236.1.XXX.
Verify the Pinterest crawler
- Use the host command to run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address from your logs
- Verify that the domain name in the response ends with pinterest.com
- Use the host command to run a forward DNS lookup on the response retrieved from step 1
- Verify that it is the same as the IP address from step 1
If you receive a consistent volume of traffic from a client sending a valid Pinterest user-agent but it does not pass the above DNS test, please contact us.
Restrict or limit Pinterest from accessing your site
To modify the behavior of the Pinterest crawler, you'll need to update your site's robots.txt file. Make sure to place the robots.txt file on your main domain, because we do not support robots.txt files on subdomains.
Large crawl delays impact the distribution and recommendation of your content on Pinterest. Therefore, we honor delays of up to 1 and will treat any larger values as 1. If you acknowledge this and still need a larger crawl delay, contact us.