Who operates Shortwave Image Fetcher?

Shortwave Image Fetcher is operated by Shortwave Communications Inc.. It functions as Shortwave Communications Inc.'s link preview bot.

Does Shortwave Image Fetcher respect robots.txt?

Shortwave Communications Inc. has not published a robots.txt commitment for Shortwave Image Fetcher. Treat its behavior as unconfirmed and watch your access logs to see whether your rules are honored.

Should I block Shortwave Image Fetcher?

Usually no. Blocking Shortwave Image Fetcher means links to your pages lose their preview cards, which typically reduces how many people click through.

Shortwave Image Fetcher - What It Is & How to Handle It

What is Shortwave Image Fetcher?

Shortwave Image Fetcher is Shortwave Communications Inc.'s link preview bot. An email client that proxies all images found in HTML emails from to protect end customer's IP address and connection private.

Shortwave Image Fetcher 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, Shortwave Image Fetcher 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 Shortwave Image Fetcher

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

To control Shortwave Image Fetcher, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Shortwave Image Fetcher
Disallow: /

Shortwave Communications Inc. does not publish a robots.txt commitment for Shortwave Image Fetcher, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

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