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Steam Chat

The Steam Chat bot fetches previews of URLs shared within the Steam client's chat feature.
Valve SoftwareSteamChat
Preview

What is Steam Chat?

Steam Chat is Valve Software's link preview bot. The Steam Chat bot fetches previews of URLs shared within the Steam client's chat feature.

Steam Chat 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, Steam Chat 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 Steam Chat

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

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

User-agent: SteamChat
Disallow: /

Valve Software does not publish a robots.txt commitment for Steam Chat, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

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

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Frequently asked questions about Steam Chat

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

Steam Chat is operated by Valve Software. It functions as Valve Software's link preview bot.

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