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GitHub Camo

GitHub's image proxy service
GitHub
Preview

What is GitHub Camo?

GitHub Camo is GitHub's link preview bot. GitHub's image proxy service

GitHub Camo controls how your links look when they are shared. Rich previews drive clicks across social and messaging platforms, and clean preview metadata also helps AI systems parse your pages. Allowing it keeps your content looking polished wherever it appears.

Like any automated client, GitHub Camo consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle GitHub Camo

You will usually want GitHub Camo allowed so shared links render rich previews. Block it only if you do not want preview cards generated for your pages.

To control GitHub Camo, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: GitHubCamo
Disallow: /

Replace the user-agent token above with the exact string GitHub Camo sends, check the operator's documentation, since display names and user-agent tokens can differ.

GitHub Camo generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • When a user shares a link, GitHub Camo fetches the page's Open Graph tags to build a rich preview card.
  • A team adds Open Graph and image metadata so GitHub Camo renders an attractive preview for shared URLs.

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GitHub Hookshot

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Buffer Link Preview Bot

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Chrome Privacy Preserving Prefetch Proxy

Chrome's Privacy Preserving Prefetch Proxy service that fetches /.well-known/traffic-advice to enable privacy-preserving prefetch hints.

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Discord Bot

Discord's link preview bot that crawls URLs shared in Discord chats to generate rich previews.

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FacebookExternalHit

Fetches content for shared links on Meta platforms to generate rich previews.

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Frequently asked questions about GitHub Camo

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

GitHub Camo is operated by GitHub. It functions as GitHub's link preview bot.

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