# Yahoo Link Preview

Yahoo Link Preview is the web fetcher for Yahoo Mail. It is not a general-purpose crawler but an on-demand bot that visits a web page only when a user includes a link to it in a Yahoo Mail message. Its purpose is to retrieve metadata like the title and thumbnail image to generate the rich link preview that appears in the email. For website owners, this is beneficial as it makes your content more engaging when shared.

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- [Yahoo Link Preview](https://plainsignal.com/agents/yahoo-link-preview)


## What is Yahoo Link Preview?

Yahoo Link Preview is an automated web service from Yahoo that generates visual link previews for URLs shared in Yahoo Mail. It is a specialized web client that fetches and analyzes web pages to extract metadata when a user pastes a link into an email. The service identifies itself with the user-agent string `Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo Link Preview; ...)`. It primarily relies on static HTML analysis and Open Graph tags to efficiently extract the metadata needed for a preview.


## Why is Yahoo Link Preview crawling my site?

Yahoo Link Preview is visiting your site because someone has included a link to your content in a Yahoo Mail message. Its visits are triggered by this user action, not by a systematic crawl. The service looks for metadata that helps create a rich link preview, such as titles, descriptions, and featured images. The visits are typically a one-time event per URL, as Yahoo uses caching to reduce duplicate requests.


## What is the purpose of Yahoo Link Preview?

The purpose of Yahoo Link Preview is to enhance the user experience in Yahoo Mail by transforming plain text URLs into visually informative previews. This benefits both the sender, by creating more engaging messages, and the recipient, by providing visual verification of a link's destination. The system also contributes to Yahoo's anti-phishing efforts by analyzing domain reputation as part of the preview generation process. For website owners, well-optimized previews can improve click-through rates.


## How do I block Yahoo Link Preview?

To prevent Yahoo Link Preview from generating previews of your content, you can add a disallow rule to your `robots.txt` file. This will cause links to your site to appear as plain text in Yahoo Mail.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your `robots.txt` file:

```
User-agent: Yahoo Link Preview
Disallow: /
```


## Related agents and operators


## Canonical

Human friendly, reader version of this article is available at [Yahoo Link Preview](https://plainsignal.com/agents/yahoo-link-preview)

## Copyright

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