Iframely bot

Iframely is a specialized web crawler and service that focuses on extracting and processing embedded content from web pages. It is an oEmbed and Open Graph processing service that helps websites generate rich link previews when content is shared. The bot identifies itself in server logs with a user-agent string like Iframely/1.3.1 (+https://iframely.com/docs/about). It works by visiting a specific URL, analyzing its structure, and extracting the metadata needed to create an accurate and visually appealing preview when that URL is embedded elsewhere.

The Iframely bot is crawling your website because someone has requested a preview of your content on another platform that uses the Iframely service. Its visits are triggered by user actions, such as sharing a link, rather than by an automated crawling schedule. The bot specifically looks for metadata, Open Graph tags, and other structured data that help it understand how to properly represent your content in an embed. The frequency of visits depends entirely on how often your content is shared on platforms using Iframely.

The purpose of the Iframely bot is to support content embedding and link unfurling services that help applications display rich previews of external content. It transforms simple URLs into informative, interactive previews that enhance the user experience. For website owners, Iframely provides value by ensuring that your content is represented correctly when it is shared across the web. This helps maintain brand consistency and can drive traffic back to your original source through more engaging and clickable previews.

If you wish to prevent Iframely from generating previews of your content, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will cause links to your site to appear as plain text when shared on platforms using this service.

To block the Iframely bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Iframely
Disallow: /