What is Yahoo Link Preview?
Yahoo Link Preview bot fetches metadata and preview data from URLs shared on Yahoo platforms and services. Supports Yahoo's social features, news aggregation, and content discovery across their ecosystem of web properties. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Yahoo Link Preview visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo Link Preview; https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail/yahoo-link-preview-SLN23615.html) |
| Operated By | Yahoo |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Shared link |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
Why Is Yahoo Link Preview Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. Yahoo Link Preview fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.
Should I Block Yahoo Link Preview?
Usually not. Blocking Yahoo Link Preview may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Yahoo Link Preview.
Insights for Yahoo Link Preview
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Yahoo Link Preview Traffic
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Yahoo Link Preview?
Yahoo Link Preview usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
Does Yahoo Link Preview Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. Yahoo Link Preview is not expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Is Yahoo Link Preview Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. Yahoo Link Preview is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking Yahoo Link Preview Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. Yahoo Link Preview's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does Yahoo Link Preview Access Private Content?
No. Yahoo Link Preview has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
How Can I Verify a Request From Yahoo Link Preview?
Agent Analytics tracks Yahoo Link Preview visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Yahoo Link Preview". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because Yahoo Link Preview does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
How Is Yahoo Link Preview Different From Other Yahoo Agents?
Yahoo operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- YahooMailProxy: YahooMailProxy retrieves and caches webpage content from URLs embedded in Yahoo Mail emails, improving security and reducing bandwidth usage for email users.
- Yahoo Ad monitoring: Yahoo Ad monitoring crawls webpages where Yahoo advertisements are served to monitor content quality, ad placement compliance, and advertiser policy adherence.
- Yahoo Japan: Yahoo Japan is an intelligence gatherer operated by Yahoo.
- Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler: Y!J-BRZ/YATSHA crawler is a search engine crawler operated by Yahoo Japan that indexes web pages for inclusion in Yahoo Japan's search results. This bot visits websites t…
- Yahoo! Slurp: Yahoo! Slurp crawls and indexes web content for Yahoo's search engine, collecting data to power search results and web discovery features.