Apple Link Preview is the fetcher behind rich link previews in iMessage, Mail, Notes and the iOS and macOS system share sheet. When a user shares or receives a URL, the request is made directly from that user's device to read Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata, so it arrives from consumer ISP addresses or from iCloud Private Relay egress rather than from Apple-owned server ranges. Its user agent reports a frozen Safari 9.0.1 build and appends the facebookexternalhit, Facebot and Twitterbot tokens so that sites serving metadata to social crawlers respond to it; the requests are not made by Meta or by X. Because the traffic originates on end-user devices, no IP range or reverse-DNS verification is possible.

At a glance

Operator: Apple
Type: Preview

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.

Apple Link Preview publishes nothing Centinel can check a source against, so a match reports the name and leaves the source unconfirmed. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Preview.

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