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What is Microsoft Preview?

Direct Answer: Microsoft Preview bot generates page snapshots for Microsoft products.

Operator: Microsoft Type: Social Media Bot Purpose: Generating page snapshots for Microsoft products

The Microsoft Preview bot, operated by Microsoft, is used to generate page snapshots for Microsoft products. It uses the user-agent string 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview)'.

User-Agent Identification

The following user-agent strings identify Microsoft Preview in your live traffic data:

  • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview)

robots.txt Rules for Microsoft Preview

Respects robots.txt: No

This bot does not commit to following robots.txt

Microsoft Preview does not officially follow robots.txt directives. The only reliable way to control access is through server-side blocking (IP filtering, user-agent rules in your web server config) combined with log monitoring to verify effectiveness.

Need continuous verification across 500+ bots? Can AI See It automates this.

Crawl Behavior

Frequency:Not Documented

Request Pattern:Not Documented

Crawl Activity Index

Relative crawl activity for Microsoft Preview over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.

View recent activity data (last 7 days)
Date Activity Index
Mar 26, 2026 88.0
Mar 27, 2026 82.7
Mar 28, 2026 83.1
Mar 29, 2026 81.8
Mar 30, 2026 87.3
Mar 31, 2026 90.2
Apr 1, 2026 88.9

Source: Cloudflare Radar

Why track Microsoft Preview traffic?

Ensure your link previews render correctly. Microsoft Preview fetches your pages to generate link preview cards on Microsoft. If it can't access your meta tags, your shared links display broken or generic previews.

Monitor social sharing activity. Microsoft Preview requests correlate with how often your URLs are being shared on Microsoft, even before engagement metrics are available.

Log Verification

To verify Microsoft Preview traffic in your live traffic data:

  1. Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
  2. Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Microsoft)
  3. Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
  4. Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available

Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.

Undocumented Information

The following information is not officially documented for Microsoft Preview:

  • crawl frequency
  • IP verification
  • JavaScript rendering
  • official quotes

Verify your link previews work — and track social bot access

  • Confirm Microsoft Preview can access your Open Graph meta tags
  • Track which URLs are being shared on Microsoft
  • Detect failed fetches causing broken preview cards
Start measuring for free → See how it works →

Official Documentation

View Official Microsoft Preview Documentation →

Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.