Directory/Categories/Page Preview/twitterbot

twitterbot

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

A Twitter bot is a type of bot software that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. The bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts. Operated by Twitter.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Page Preview

What is twitterbot?

twitterbot is a web crawler operated by Twitter. A Twitter bot is a type of bot software that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. The bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts.

Helpful — Verified, safe crawler. Respects robots.txt and provides operator documentation.

Identification

Bot name

twitterbot

Operator

Twitter

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly

Yes

Verified by Cloudflare

Yes

Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs

Not stated

Ignores site rules

None found

Disguises itself or evades blocks

None found

Overloads sites

None found

How widely people complain

One or two isolated anecdotes from individual site owners

Reddit discussion

Discussion is neutral or practical, such as how to allow or block it

What we read

Why it crawls your site

twitterbot crawls websites to generate link previews and thumbnails for shared URLs. It is operated by Twitter as part of their link preview infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

Block or allow twitterbot

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for Twitterbot/ in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block twitterbot from crawling your entire site
User-agent: Twitterbot/
Disallow: /

# Allow twitterbot full access
User-agent: Twitterbot/
Allow: /