`Slackbot-LinkExpanding`

Slack says Slackbot-LinkExpanding responds to links that people post in channels. It fetches as little of the page as it can, using HTTP Range headers, to read oEmbed and Twitter Card or Open Graph tags, and it fetches a referred image, video, or audio file to check it. Slack says those responses are cached for about 30 minutes. The page says Slack does not currently honor robots.txt, because it does not follow links and acts on behalf of a person. This check matches the whole token, so a group named Slackbot does not match, and it still reports the RFC 9309 decision. This check does not contact Slack.

robots.txt token: Slackbot-LinkExpanding
Operator: Slack
Kind: user_fetch
robots.txt: does_not_follow. The vendor says this crawler does not follow robots.txt rules.
HTTP user-agent: Slackbot-LinkExpanding 1.0 (+https://api.slack.com/robots) The page prints this string as the user agent. It does not print a separate robots.txt User-agent line. A group named Slackbot does not match this token.
IP list: None on the cited page. The page does not publish an IP list. It says a site that still wants to be blocked from slack.com embeds can contact Slack. Botcard does not contact Slack and does not copy addresses.
Source: Slack Robots. Retrieved 2026-10-18.

JSON

curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/v1/crawlers/slackbot-linkexpanding

Check this token

tools/call with name check_robots is the same check at POST /mcp. The pasted file disallows Slackbot-LinkExpanding on /docs and allows *. The call does not fetch a host.

curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/mcp -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"check_robots","arguments":{"robots_txt":"User-agent: Slackbot-LinkExpanding\nDisallow: /\n\nUser-agent: *\nAllow: /\n","path":"/docs","ids":["slackbot-linkexpanding"]}}}'

That call returns fetched_target false. This row is disallow via group Slackbot-LinkExpanding, rule Disallow: /.