Pinterestbot

What it does

Pinterestbot visits public websites to index their content, which Pinterest says is meant to drive traffic back to those sites when their pages are pinned. This indexing keeps Pin previews current, including the title, image, and pricing shown when someone saves a link from a site, and it also lets Pinterest detect when a previously pinned link has broken. Pinterest states it does not use content crawled by Pinterestbot to train its image-generation model, Pinterest Canvas, separating this crawler's role from any AI training use. Pinterestbot honors crawl-delay values in robots.txt, though Pinterest caps the effective delay at 1 second, treating any larger requested value as if it were 1 second.

Facts

Should you block it?

Because Pinterest explicitly ties Pinterestbot's crawling to driving traffic back to the sites it indexes, blocking it mainly costs a site accurate, up to date Pin previews, including pricing and titles, and removes Pinterest's ability to detect when a pinned link to that site has broken. For a retailer or brand that gets meaningful traffic from Pins, keeping Pinterestbot allowed protects that referral channel. Pinterest's statement that it does not use this crawl to train Pinterest Canvas, its image-generation model, means the usual AI-training tradeoff is largely absent here; the decision is really about whether Pinterest's shopping and discovery features work well for a site's content. A site that doesn't participate in Pinterest at all has less reason to care either way, though blocking costs little beyond foregoing that platform's traffic.

How to block it

robots.txt can scope rules to specific paths for Pinterestbot: user-agent: Pinterestbot disallow: /directory1/ Pinterest honors crawl-delay directives up to 1 second, treating any larger requested delay as 1 second, so a full block is the only way to stop crawling entirely rather than just slowing it.

Related

• AI crawler directory — every AI crawler's robots.txt token, purpose and facts in one place.
• Free AI crawler checker — check which AI crawlers a domain's robots.txt actually allows or blocks.
• Glossary — definitions of the AI-visibility terms that come up alongside crawler behavior.