Slackbot
Slack · Other bots · User agent only
About this crawler
Fetches shared links to unfurl them in Slack.
Usually means: A product is checking the page for a specific job: an ad review, a link preview, a feed or an SEO index.
User agent
Slackbot
MetricRaven matches this token anywhere in the request's user agent, ignoring case. Operators add version numbers and browser text around it, for example "Slackbot/1.0".
IP verification
Slack publishes no IP ranges for Slackbot, 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: Slackbot Disallow: /private/
Well-behaved crawlers re-read robots.txt within a day or so.
Questions
- What is Slackbot?
- Fetches shared links to unfurl them in Slack. 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 Slackbot?
- Slack publishes no IP ranges for Slackbot, so only the user agent identifies it. Anyone can send that string, so treat it as a claim.
- How do I block or allow Slackbot?
- Add a robots.txt group for "Slackbot" 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 Slackbot 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.