Slackbot
Slack's link expansion web crawler bot
About this crawler
Slackbot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Slackbot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as social-preview. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Slackbot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
0.13%
Technical details
- Name
- Slackbot
- Pattern
Slackbot- Tags
- social-preview
- Reference
- https://api.slack.com/robots
- Added
- 2016/11/03
- rDNS suffixes
.slack-edge.com,.slack.com- Instances
- 3 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely Slackbot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.slack-edge.com.slack.com
Sample User-Agent strings
Slackbot-LinkExpanding (+https://api.slack.com/robots)
Slackbot-LinkExpanding 1.0 (+https://api.slack.com/robots)
Slackbot 1.0 (+https://api.slack.com/robots)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Slackbot:
User-agent: Slackbot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slackbot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Slackbot") {
return 403;
}
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