Viber bot

What is Viber?

Viber is a cross-platform messaging and VoIP application operated by Rakuten Viber (formerly Viber Media S.à r.l.), a subsidiary of Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. Beyond its consumer-facing messaging app, Viber offers business solutions including chatbots that can interact with users on the platform. Viber bots are automated conversational agents that businesses can deploy to engage with customers through the Viber messaging platform. When Viber's systems interact with websites, they typically identify themselves with user-agent strings containing Viber or related identifiers.

The Viber platform allows businesses to create chatbots for user-initiated two-way conversations. These bots can send messages, process payments, handle customer support inquiries, and provide automated responses to user queries. Viber bots operate using unique IDs rather than phone numbers, allowing businesses to communicate with users without collecting their personal phone information.

Viber's business solutions include both chatbots and Business Messages, which together form Viber's Messaging Solutions for brands and companies looking to engage with customers on the platform.

Why is Viber crawling my site?

If you notice Viber crawling your website, it's likely related to link previews or content enrichment within the Viber messaging platform. When users share links to your website in Viber conversations, the platform may crawl those pages to generate preview cards with titles, descriptions, and images. This helps create a richer messaging experience when your content is shared.

Viber may also crawl websites when businesses integrate web content into their chatbot experiences. For instance, a Viber bot might need to retrieve information from your site to answer user questions or display product information within the chat interface.

The frequency of these visits typically depends on how often your content is shared on the platform or referenced by chatbots. Crawling by Viber is generally considered authorized normal behavior as it enables proper display of your content when shared within their ecosystem.

What is the purpose of Viber?

The primary purpose of Viber's web crawling is to enhance the messaging experience by providing rich previews of shared content and supporting chatbot functionality. When users share links in Viber conversations, the platform needs to fetch metadata from those pages to create informative preview cards that show titles, descriptions, and images.

For businesses using Viber's chatbot platform, the crawling may support features like retrieving dynamic content from websites to display within chatbot conversations. This allows chatbots to access up-to-date information or product details directly from a company's website.

Website owners benefit from this crawling as it ensures their content appears correctly when shared on Viber, potentially driving traffic and engagement. The preview cards make shared links more appealing and informative, increasing the likelihood that recipients will click through to the original content.

How do I block Viber?

If you wish to control Viber's access to your website, you can use the standard robots.txt protocol, which Viber's systems generally respect. To block Viber's crawlers completely, add the following directives to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Viber
Disallow: /

For more selective blocking, you can disallow specific directories or files:

User-agent: Viber
Disallow: /private-content/
Disallow: /sensitive-data.html

Keep in mind that blocking Viber's access to your site will affect how your content appears when shared in Viber conversations. Instead of rich previews with images and descriptions, users might only see basic links, which could reduce engagement with your content.

If you're experiencing excessive crawling that impacts server performance, consider implementing rate limiting through your web server configuration rather than completely blocking access. This allows Viber to still generate previews while preventing server overload.

For businesses using Viber chatbots that need to access your website content, blocking might disrupt those integrations. Before implementing blocks, check if any of your business partners or marketing channels use Viber chatbots that require access to your website.