Firecut LinkPreview Bot

Learn about our web crawler that generates rich social media previews for your shortened links.

The Firecut LinkPreview Bot is a friendly web crawler that visits your target URLs to extract metadata and generate beautiful social media previews for your shortened links.

When someone shares your Firecut short link on social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Slack, our bot ensures they see a rich preview with the title, description, and image from your target page.

Our bot is designed to be lightweight, respectful, and efficient. It only crawls when necessary and follows web standards to minimize impact on your servers.

Key Features

Built with performance, respect, and reliability in mind.

Open Graph Metadata

Automatically extracts og:title, og:description, and og:image from your target URLs for rich social media previews.

Fast & Efficient

Optimized HTML parsing with content limit ensures quick response times without overloading your servers.

Respectful Crawling

Follows best practices with proper User-Agent identification and reasonable timeout settings.

How It Works

A simple, efficient process that happens automatically behind the scenes.

Link Creation

When you create or update a shortened link in Firecut, our bot is triggered.

Metadata Fetch

The bot visits your target URL and extracts Open Graph metadata from the HTML <head> section.

Preview Generation

We generate a rich preview page that social media platforms use when your short link is shared.

Caching

The preview is cached, so we only crawl your site once per link update.

Technical Details

Everything you need to know about our bot's behavior.

User-Agent

Firecut-LinkPreview/1.0

Identifies our bot in your server logs

Retry Policy

2 retry attempts with exponential backoff

Retries failed requests to handle temporary issues

Crawl Rate

On-demand only

Only crawls when links are created or updated

Content Limit

Maximum 64KB

Only downloads the <head> section for metadata

Timeout

10 seconds

Maximum time to wait for a response

Redirects

Limited

Follows redirects to reach the final destination

Add Your Bot to Our Preview List

Want your social media platform or bot to receive rich previews from Firecut links?

Firecut recognizes major social media platforms and collaboration tools to serve rich link previews. If you're building a platform, bot, or tool that would benefit from receiving Open Graph previews when users share Firecut links, we'd love to add your bot to our recognized list.

Currently Supported Platforms

We currently support preview bots from:

• Facebook

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

• Slack

• Discord

• WhatsApp

• Pinterest

• Telegram

• Skype

• Google tools

To request adding a bot or platform, please provide the bot's User-Agent string and a brief description of the platform. Whether you own the platform or simply want to see it supported, we'll review your request and consider adding it to our recognized bot list.

Request to Add Your Bot

Questions or Concerns?

If you have any questions about our bot or need to report an issue, we're here to help.