MicrosoftPreview

What is MicrosoftPreview?

About

MicrosoftPreview is a web crawler that generates page snapshots and link previews for Microsoft products and services, extracting metadata and visual content to create rich previews in applications. You can see how often MicrosoftPreview visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.

Type

Fetcher

Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By	Microsoft
Last Updated	18 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0% of top websites are blocking MicrosoftPreview

Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States

MicrosoftPreview normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Get These Insights for Your Website

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Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block MicrosoftPreview?

Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.

How Do I Block MicrosoftPreview?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block MicrosoftPreview or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview) Chrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36

# robots.txt
# This should block MicrosoftPreview

User-agent: MicrosoftPreview
Disallow: /