Identification
Spot us in your logs
Everything you need to recognize, verify, or allowlist the bot. Same data is available as JSON.
Bot name
BufferLinkPreviewBot
User-Agent
BufferLinkPreviewBot/1.0 (+https://scraper.buffer.com/about/bots/link-preview-bot)
Request headers
X-BufferLinkPreviewBottrue
X-BufferLinkPreviewBot-Version1.0
X-BufferLinkPreviewBot-Documentationhttps://scraper.buffer.com/about/bots/link-preview-bot
Egress IP addresses
3.213.140.44/3252.22.148.168/3252.3.218.210/3254.235.34.237/323.220.253.227/323.224.33.156/3252.87.69.215/3254.211.190.68/32
Purpose
What this bot does
Buffer is a social media management platform used by millions of businesses and creators. When someone shares a link in Buffer, this crawler generates a rich preview so they know exactly how their post will look:
- Link previews — title, description, and thumbnail for the shared URL
- Image embedding — pulling images from the page so they can be included in a post
- Content confidence — letting people see what they're sharing before it goes live
Good citizenship
How we crawl respectfully
- Identifies itself clearly as BufferLinkPreviewBot
- Honors robots.txt directives
- Rate-limits requests to avoid straining your servers
- Accesses only publicly available content — never private data or anything behind authentication
- Publishes this documentation and a contact address
Scope
What we access
The bot only reads publicly available information used to build a preview:
- Titles & descriptions — the text of the preview
- Images & thumbnails — the visual of the preview
- Open Graph & Twitter Card data — when present
- robots.txt — to respect your crawling preferences
For website owners & security teams
Need to allowlist or reach us?
- User-Agent — match BufferLinkPreviewBot in your logs
- IP addresses — allowlist the addresses listed above if needed
- Control — use robots.txt to specify which pages we may access
- Contact — email support@buffer.com with any questions
Programmatic access
For automated systems, the same details are available in a machine-readable format:
GET /about/bots/link-preview-bot.json