: Is it possible to stop Chrome and other browsers from pre-fetching/rendering my site? I know you can guide Chrome to prefetch links you think users are likely to click on your site, but can

@Voss4911412

Above answer did not work for me. What did work, however, was this:

RewriteEngine On
SetEnvIfNoCase X-Forwarded-For .+ proxy=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase X-moz prefetch no_access=yes

# block pre-fetch requests with X-moz headers
RewriteCond %{ENV:no_access} yes
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]


From: askapache.com

The [F] flag returns a 403 Forbidden status code to the browser, while the [L] indicates that rule should be the last rule to be processed.

Also, chrome does not seem to prefetch links any longer (at least, for the prev/next meta tags).

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@Megan663

Google Chrome does not send any special headers to prerender requests anymore. See:

code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=86175 https://github.com/nickhsharp/prefetchNightmare

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@Jessie594

Chrome and Safari send an X-Purpose: preview HTTP header when pre-fetching/rendering web content. [Source]

Firefox sends a similar header called X-moz: prefetch. [Source]

To block pre-fetching, you could return a 404 response when such headers are detected, as suggested by Peter Freitag in this blog post. He recommends adding these lines to .htaccess to block Firefox prefetching:

RewriteEngine On
SetEnvIf X-moz prefetch HAS_X-moz
RewriteCond %{ENV:HAS_X-moz} prefetch
RewriteRule .* /prefetch-attempt [L]


You can extend this to block Firefox, Safari, and Chrome prefetching like this (untested, but should work):

RewriteEngine On
SetEnvIf X-moz prefetch HAS_preview
SetEnvIf X-Purpose preview HAS_preview
RewriteCond %{ENV:HAS_preview} .
RewriteRule .* /prefetch-attempt [L]

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