Meta · Other bots · User agent only
About this crawler
Builds link previews in WhatsApp.
Usually means: A product is checking the page for a specific job: an ad review, a link preview, a feed or an SEO index.
WhatsApp doesn't document this user agent.
User agent
MetricRaven matches this token anywhere in the request's user agent, ignoring case. Operators add version numbers and browser text around it, for example "WhatsApp/1.0".
IP verification
Meta publishes no IP ranges for WhatsApp, so requests are identified by user agent only and recorded as unverified. Anyone can send this user agent.
Control it in robots.txt
User-agent: WhatsApp Disallow: /private/
Well-behaved crawlers re-read robots.txt within a day or so.
Questions
- What is WhatsApp?
- Builds link previews in WhatsApp. MetricRaven groups it under Other bots: ad checks, link previews, feed readers, SEO tools and other bots.
- How do I verify that a request really comes from WhatsApp?
- Meta publishes no IP ranges for WhatsApp, so only the user agent identifies it. Anyone can send that string, so treat it as a claim.
- How do I block or allow WhatsApp?
- Add a robots.txt group for "WhatsApp" with the paths to allow or disallow. Fetchers that act for a user may ignore robots.txt; block those at your server or firewall instead.
- How can I see when WhatsApp visits my website?
- Most crawlers never run JavaScript, so browser analytics miss them. MetricRaven's @metricraven/ai-crawl package reports crawler requests from your server, verifies their IPs against published ranges, and shows which pages each crawler reads.
See when AI assistants and crawlers read your site
Add one line to your server and MetricRaven shows which assistants, search engines and training crawlers request your pages, which ones are IP-verified, and the URLs they expected to find, including 404s.