Viber bot

The Viber bot is a web fetcher for the messaging and VoIP application Viber. While Viber's primary function is not web crawling, its systems interact with websites when users share links or when businesses use its chatbot platform. When it fetches data for link previews, it typically identifies itself with a user-agent string containing Viber. The bot's function is to enhance the user experience by providing visual and contextual information about shared links.

A Viber bot is crawling your website because a user has shared a link to your content in a Viber conversation. The platform is crawling the page to generate a preview card with a title, description, and image. A Viber bot may also be accessing your site if a business has integrated your web content into their chatbot experience. The frequency of visits depends entirely on how often your content is shared on the platform. This is a legitimate and authorized activity.

The purpose of the Viber bot is to enhance the messaging experience by providing rich previews of shared content and supporting chatbot functionality. For website owners, this is beneficial as it ensures your content appears correctly and attractively when shared on Viber, which can drive traffic and engagement. The preview cards make shared links more appealing, increasing the likelihood that users will click through to the original content.

To prevent the Viber bot 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 URLs.

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

User-agent: Viber
Disallow: /