Twitterbot

What is Twitterbot?

About

Twitterbot crawls web pages to generate Twitter Cards, fetching metadata like titles, descriptions, and images for link previews when URLs are shared on X (formerly Twitter). You can see how often Twitterbot 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 X
Last Updated 10 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

11%
11% of top websites are blocking Twitterbot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
Twitterbot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Top Visited Website Categories

News
Arts and Entertainment
Science
Hobbies and Leisure
Finance
How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block Twitterbot?

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 Twitterbot?

You can block Twitterbot 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.

How Do I Block All Fetchers?
Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new fetchers automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt
User Agent String Twitterbot/1.0 
# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: Twitterbot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/twitterbot
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References