# 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.

- 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
- Source: https://api.slack.com/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 https://whosthatbot.com/mcp. Send `Content-Type: application/json` and `Accept: application/json, text/event-stream`. 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: /.

Each card paraphrases the linked vendor page and was checked on source.retrieved. This is not legal advice. robots.txt is a request from the site owner. Botcard does not fetch third-party sites and does not suggest ways around a disallow rule.