What is Yahoo Link Preview?
Yahoo Link Preview fetches a page when a Yahoo Mail user references its URL in an email. Yahoo uses the response to provide a thumbnail, page title, and description alongside the link in the message. The request is part of composing or displaying mail, not a general sweep of the domain.
Yahoo explicitly calls this service a page-fetch client rather than a crawler. It requests pages that users link to and does not discover additional URLs by following the site's navigation. Traffic can therefore be sporadic and tied to individual shared URLs instead of a crawl schedule.
Robots behavior is unknown in this directory, and Cloudflare's bot directory marks the client as not following robots.txt. Cloudflare also provides no signature-agent URL, while this page is not marked as IP verified. The full user agent can classify a request, but a site that needs to prove origin or enforce a block must use controls beyond that header.
The preview is based on what this unauthenticated client can retrieve. A public article can provide the title, description, and thumbnail used in mail, while a protected URL should return its ordinary login or authorization response. Link Preview is not a reason to make private content public.
The operator's Yahoo Link Preview help page gives the full identity as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo Link Preview; https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail/yahoo-link-preview-SLN23615.html). Cloudflare's bot directory records the same string and matches Yahoo Link Preview. This is more specific than looking for every request with Yahoo in its user agent.
There is no documented AI use for these fetches. Yahoo Link Preview does not index the site for search, collect training data, or make the page a source for generated answers according to the cited operator description. Its direct effect is confined to the representation of a shared URL in Yahoo Mail.
