Microsoft

No. Blocking fetchers prevents link previews from appearing when your content is shared on social media, messaging apps, and other platforms. This significantly reduces click-through rates and social engagement. Link previews are crucial for content distribution.

If you want to, you can block or limit Microsoft Preview's access by configuring user agent token rules in your robots.txt file. The best way to do this is using Automatic Robots.txt, which update automatically as new agents are discovered. While the vast majority of agents operated by reputable companies honor these robots.txt directives, bad actors may choose to ignore them entirely. In that case, you'll need to implement alternative blocking methods such as firewall rules or server-level restrictions. You can verify whether Microsoft Preview is respecting your rules by setting up Agent Analytics to monitor its visits to your website.

Blocking fetchers will hurt your social SEO and content distribution. Link previews significantly improve click-through rates from social media, messaging apps, and other platforms. Without previews, your content appears less engaging when shared, reducing social signals that can indirectly benefit search rankings.

Fetchers only access the specific URLs that users share or embed, without credentials or authentication. They're designed to retrieve publicly accessible metadata and preview information. Fetchers don't crawl beyond the shared URL and can't access private content unless the shared link itself provides public access to otherwise private information.

Setting up Agent Analytics will give you realtime visibility into Microsoft Preview visiting your website, along with hundreds of other AI agents, crawlers, and scrapers. This will also let you measure human traffic to your website coming from AI search and chat LLM platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Microsoft Preview visited your site because someone shared one of your URLs on a social platform, messaging app, or another service that generates link previews. The fetcher was triggered when the link was posted to retrieve your page's title, description, and preview image.

Agent Analytics authenticates agent visits from many agents, letting you know whether each one was actually from that agent, or spoofed by a bad actor. This helps you identify suspicious traffic patterns and make informed decisions about blocking or allowing specific user agents.