What is Pinterestbot? Pinterest's social platform crawler
Pinterestbot is Pinterest's crawler. Pinterest says it indexes public websites to send traffic back to them, and checks the pages behind Pins to keep their details current and find broken links.
23 of the 1662 major websites we measure block Pinterestbot in robots.txt (1%). 54 of those sites name it directly in their robots.txt; the rest are covered by a wildcard rule.
Key facts
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| Used for | |
| Type | Social platform. Crawls for a social platform's own features. It isn't counted in the AI crawler figures. |
| robots.txt token | Pinterestbot |
| Operator's documentation | Read it here |
What blocking Pinterestbot does
Pinterest says Pinterestbot honours robots.txt on the main domain only (subdomains are not supported) and treats a crawl delay above 1 as 1.
How to allow or block Pinterestbot
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. It is a stated preference that well-behaved crawlers read, not an enforcement mechanism.
User-agent: Pinterestbot Disallow: /
User-agent: Pinterestbot Allow: /
Pinterestbot user agent string
The string Pinterest documents. Version numbers can change, so match on the name.
Pinterest/0.2 (+https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
How to verify a request is really Pinterestbot
Anyone can put a crawler's name in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Pinterest says to check that the address's reverse DNS name ends in pinterest.com or pinterestcrawler.com and that a forward lookup returns the same address.
How to whitelist Pinterestbot in a firewall or CDN
robots.txt only states a preference. A firewall, CDN or bot protection service can still refuse the request, and the crawler then gets an error even though robots.txt allows it.
- Check that no group in your robots.txt blocks it, using the rule above.
- Add an allow rule in your firewall or CDN that matches the name in the user agent. Keep the rule narrow, because anyone can copy a name.
- Check your server logs for a 200 response from Pinterestbot afterwards.
On Cloudflare, also check AI Crawler and Agent access policies, which can block search, agent and training traffic across a site.
Why Pinterestbot gets a 403 or 405 error
A 403 means the server refused the request, which usually points to a firewall or bot rule. A 405 means the server refused the request's method, so check any rule that only permits certain methods. A crawler that obeys robots.txt won't request a page it is told to avoid, so an error in your logs points to your server's configuration. To stop it deliberately at the server, this nginx rule returns a 403:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Pinterestbot") {
return 403;
}Who blocks Pinterestbot, by sector
| Sector | Sites measured | Blocking | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social and media platforms | 115 | 6 | 5% |
| Reference and research | 114 | 4 | 4% |
| AI companies | 128 | 2 | 2% |
| Government and institutions | 98 | 2 | 2% |
| News publishers | 182 | 3 | 2% |
| Technology media | 126 | 2 | 2% |
| E-commerce and retail | 92 | 1 | 1% |
| Finance and business media | 94 | 1 | 1% |
| Hosting and infrastructure | 98 | 1 | 1% |
| SaaS platforms | 196 | 1 | 1% |
| Developer references | 159 | 0 | 0% |
| Health publishers | 88 | 0 | 0% |
| SEO and marketing tools | 86 | 0 | 0% |
| Travel | 86 | 0 | 0% |
Sites blocking Pinterestbot
academia.edu, afterpay.com, bundesregierung.de, consilium.europa.eu, deviantart.com, distill.pub, flickr.com, fortinet.com, golem.de, hackernoon.com, instacart.com, linguee.com, lobste.rs, magento.com, netflix.com, poe.com, reddit.com, sciencedirect.com, thesun.co.uk, thetimes.co.uk, todayonline.com, wordreference.com, x.com.
Sites that allow Pinterestbot by name
allrecipes.com, architecturaldigest.com, barrons.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, bonappetit.com, cntraveler.com, devclass.com, disneyplus.com, eluniversal.com.mx, epicurious.com, ew.com, facebook.com, gq.com, imdb.com, instagram.com, investopedia.com, marketwatch.com, meta.ai, news.com.au, newyorker.com, overstock.com, parents.com, people.com, pinterest.com, pitchfork.com, poshmark.com, realtor.com, redbubble.com, reuters.com, salon.com, sap.com, self.com, seriouseats.com, shape.com, temu.com, theordinary.com, theregister.com, threads.net, thredup.com, travelandleisure.com, and 11 more in the full dataset.
See all 36 AI crawlers, the rule change log or the full study. Being reachable is only the first step: how AI search engines choose what to cite covers the rest.
Cite this data
You are welcome to quote or republish these figures. Please credit IndexHalo with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0). All our datasets are on the data page.
IndexHalo. "Pinterestbot block rate across major websites." Measured 12 November 2026. https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/pinterestbot/
<a href="https://www.indexhalo.com/ai-crawlers/pinterestbot/">Pinterestbot block rate across major websites, IndexHalo</a>