The Pinterestbot crawler
When someone saves a URL as a Pin, Pinterest crawls the page to extract meta tags and structured data. Two user agent strings:
Pinterest/0.2 (+https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)
A mobile variant also exists that emulates a mobile viewport. The robots.txt token for all variants is Pinterestbot.
No JavaScript execution
Pinterestbot does not run JavaScript. OG tags and Schema.org JSON-LD must be in the server-rendered HTML. Client-side rendered tags produce Pins with no title, description, or image.
Crawl behavior
Unlike platforms that scrape once, Pinterest periodically re-crawls pages to keep Rich Pin data fresh – product prices, article headlines, and recipe ingredients update automatically. Sites that publish frequently get re-crawled more often.
The initial crawl happens when a URL is first pinned or when Pinterestbot discovers a page through site indexing.
Rate limiting
Pinterestbot is rate-limited on Pinterest’s end, but if your server or WAF blocks it, Pin previews fail silently. Check that your robots.txt allows Pinterestbot and your CDN isn’t blocking it by IP or user agent.
Checking if Pinterestbot can reach your page
curl -A "Pinterest/0.2 (+https://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)" https://example.com/your-pageIf your <meta> tags are in the response, Pinterestbot will see them.