redditbot

redditbot is a web crawler from the social media platform Reddit. It is designed to fetch and process content from external websites when users share links in Reddit posts. The bot functions as a preview generator, scanning a shared URL to create a rich preview with a thumbnail, title, and description. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string redditbot. It is a critical component of how Reddit displays external content to its users.

redditbot is visiting your website because a Reddit user has shared a link to one of your pages. The bot's visit is to gather the information needed to generate a preview of your content within the Reddit interface. The frequency of its visits is tied directly to how often your content is shared on the platform. The bot is primarily interested in metadata that helps create rich previews, such as Open Graph tags. These crawls are considered authorized as they serve the legitimate function of properly representing your content when users share it.

The purpose of redditbot is to enhance the user experience on Reddit by providing rich, visual previews of shared links. Without this bot, shared links would be plain text URLs. The previews it generates provide context and make the content more engaging. For website owners, this is valuable as it ensures your content is presented attractively when shared on Reddit, which can significantly increase click-through rates and drive traffic from interested users. The bot only extracts the specific metadata needed for the preview; it does not index your entire site.

To prevent redditbot from generating previews of your content when it is shared on the platform, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will cause links to your site to appear as plain text URLs.

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

User-agent: redditbot
Disallow: /