In this article
  • Why the Pinterest crawler accesses your site
  • How the Pinterest crawler accesses your site
  • Verify the Pinterest crawler
  • Restrict or limit Pinterest from accessing your site
  • To help people discover and do what they love, we're creating a database of billions of Pins on Pinterest. In order to protect people on Pinterest 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.​

    Why the Pinterest crawler accesses your site

    The Pinterest crawler accesses your site for three main reasons:

  • To download the image files for each product from your Catalog
  • To collect rich metadata like the price, description and availability of your products
  • To make sure that it’s safe for people to visit
  • How the Pinterest crawler 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 us.

    The Pinterest crawler respects the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) and is configured to rate limit concurrent requests made to your site. Do not hard code these IP addresses in your site configuration, because the addresses that the crawler uses can change without notice.

    Our 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)

    Our IP is dynamic and changes frequently, but will always be in the range of 54.236.1.001 to 54.236.1.255.

    Geo-distributed crawling

    The Pinterest crawler primarily crawls with US-based IP addresses. We may also crawl with IP addresses based outside the US to support localized data.

    US-based IP addresses are always in the range of 54.236.1.XXX.

    For non US-based IP addresses, there’s no fixed range. If you're concerned that people are accessing your site while pretending to be the Pinterest crawler, verify its authenticity by following the steps in the next section, rather than relying on an IP range check.

    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 or pinterestcrawler.com
  • Use the host command to run a forward DNS lookup on the response retrieved from step one
  • Verify that it's the same as the IP address from step one
  • 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 need a larger crawl delay, contact us.

    user-agent: Pinterestbot
    Crawl-delay: 0.2
    user-agent: Pinterestbot
    disallow: /
    user-agent: Pinterestbot
    disallow: /directory1/
    user-agent: Pinterestbot
    disallow: /directory1/
    allow: /directory1/subdirectory1/
    user-agent: Pinterestbot
    disallow: /directory1/
    allow: /directory1/subdirectory1/
    crawl-delay: 0.2
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