WhatsApp's link-preview fetcher is dispatched when a user shares a URL in a WhatsApp chat. It reads Open Graph / oEmbed metadata to render the inline preview tile shown above the message. Operated by Meta; honours robots.txt.

At a glance

Operator: Meta
Type: Preview

How Centinel checks it

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

WhatsApp 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.

Back to the crawler catalog