Pinterestbot

Pinterestbot is the official web crawler for the visual discovery platform Pinterest. It is a specialized crawler designed to index and catalog visual content from across the internet. The bot's function is to discover, analyze, and index images that may be relevant to Pinterest users. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string Pinterest/0.2 (+http://www.pinterest.com/bot.html). The crawler helps maintain Pinterest's vast visual search index and is programmed to follow standard web crawling protocols.

Pinterestbot is visiting your website to discover and index its visual content for the Pinterest platform. If your site contains images, infographics, or other visual elements, the bot is likely scanning this content to make it discoverable on Pinterest. A visit can be triggered when a user 'pins' an image from your site, or if your site contains the type of visual content that is popular on the platform (e.g., recipes, home decor). The frequency of visits depends on how often your content is shared. This is a legitimate and authorized activity for a social discovery platform.

The purpose of Pinterestbot is to build and maintain Pinterest's massive visual search database. This allows users to discover relevant content based on their interests. For website owners, the bot can drive significant referral traffic when your images are discovered and shared on Pinterest. This is particularly valuable for businesses in visual-oriented industries like fashion, food, and travel. The bot also verifies and updates information about content that has already been pinned, ensuring the platform remains current.

To prevent Pinterestbot from indexing the images on your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. Note that this will prevent your visual content from being discovered and shared on the Pinterest platform, which may result in a loss of referral traffic.

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

User-agent: Pinterest
Disallow: /