Embedly and Iframely user agents
Embedly and Iframely are third-party services that generate rich embed cards and previews from a URL's oEmbed and Open Graph metadata, used by many publishing and chat tools. Their crawlers fetch your pages on behalf of those apps and identify themselves with documented tokens. They are bots, not human visits.
What this means
Embedly (Medium/Issuu-era infrastructure now under various ownership) and Iframely are services that take a URL and return a rich embed — a card, player, or preview — by reading oEmbed endpoints and Open Graph metadata. Many CMSs, chat tools, and editors use one of them to render link cards.
When such an app encounters your URL, the service's crawler fetches it. The resulting embed reflects the metadata read, not a human visit.
How they identify themselves
Embedly's crawler uses a user agent containing the Embedly token, and Iframely's uses a user agent containing the Iframely token; both typically include a self-identifying URL. Match on the stable token substrings. Both publish documentation describing their fetchers.
The user agents are claims and can be copied. The crawlers read server-rendered oEmbed/Open Graph data and provide their own validation/debug tools.
- Embedly user agent contains the Embedly token
- Iframely user agent contains the Iframely token
- Both read oEmbed endpoints and Open Graph tags
Debugging a missing embed card
If an app using Embedly or Iframely shows no card for your URL, confirm the page exposes a valid oEmbed endpoint (or Open Graph tags) and returns 200 in the initial HTML. Each service offers a debugger to preview what its crawler reads.
Seeing the Embedly or Iframely token in your logs confirms the embed fetch reached your server.
How it appears in analytics and logs
A request whose user agent contains the Embedly or Iframely token means an embedding service fetched a URL to build a preview card for some downstream app. It is bot traffic — preview generation — not audience.
Diagnostic use case
Recognise Embedly and Iframely fetches as embed-generation activity from apps that embed your content, debug missing embed cards, and keep these requests out of human analytics.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies Embedly and Iframely server-side as embed/preview bots and surfaces their fetches on the bot-intelligence view, so embed-generation crawls do not inflate human page views.
Common mistakes
- Counting Embedly/Iframely fetches as human visits from the embedding app.
- Assuming a single app — these crawlers serve many downstream products.
- Relying on JavaScript-injected metadata these crawlers do not execute.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Detection uses only the user agent. No human identity is attached to the embed fetch. WebmasterID records these as social-preview/crawler bot events, separate from human analytics.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is an Embedly/Iframely card not rendering for my URL?
- The service could not read valid oEmbed or Open Graph data. Expose a proper oEmbed endpoint or Open Graph tags, return 200, and use the service's debugger to confirm.
Related pages
- Pinterest crawler user agent
Pinterest operates a crawler that fetches URLs to validate Rich Pin metadata and build pin previews. It identifies itself with a Pinterest user-agent token and a self-identifying URL, and honours robots.txt. It is a crawler, not a human visit.
- Slackbot user agent
Slackbot is the crawler Slack uses to fetch a URL shared in a channel or DM so it can build the message unfurl from Open Graph (and where supported oEmbed) metadata. It is a link-unfurling bot, not a human visit, and identifies itself with a documented Slackbot user-agent token plus a self-identifying URL.
- Social preview bot user agents
When someone pastes your link into a social or messaging app, a preview bot fetches the page to build a card from your Open Graph and Twitter Card tags. Bots like facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, Slackbot, Discordbot, and LinkedInBot identify themselves by token. This page covers what they are and why they hit you.
- Bot intelligence
Server-side classification of embed and preview crawlers.
Sources and verification notes
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.