ow.ly
Ow.ly URL shortener crawler
About this crawler
ow.ly is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern ow\.ly in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as social-preview. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block ow.ly traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
No block-rate data for this crawler.
Technical details
- Name
- ow.ly
- Pattern
ow\.ly- Tags
- social-preview
- Reference
- http://ow.ly
- Added
- 2026/05/09
- Instances
- 1 known sample(s)
Sample User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 http://ow.ly web crawler (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow ow.ly:
User-agent: ow.ly
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ow\.ly [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "ow\\.ly") {
return 403;
}
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