I mean you can say that Twitter and Slack for example do it too, any service that generates a preview of your links, they'll crawl the URL you provide whether it's secret (eg sent in a private message) or not. Very very very few will stop at the "og:image" tags and such because why would they discard data about you?
I have observed that twitter's bot hits links within seconds of being tweeted. The traffic comes from several locations, not all twitter ASNs. One interesting source is Apple. Their bot/scanner hits soon after.
That's true of course. What's interesting to me is that they've decided to pay for this access and visit the links so quickly. It must be pretty expensive or hard to get if only around two-dozen companies pay for access to the data[0].
It might be that Apple is paying for the firehose as a data-source to bootstrap its search engine. Don't they have one accessible via Siri already ? (I don't follow Apple tech very closely).
