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YouBot

Search crawler

You.com's crawler for its search index. Seen on 47 of 135 sites in 13 weeks.

YouBot reached 32 of 92 sites last week

Sites that got at least one YouBot request each week, against every site reporting that week.

Reach39%10th of 2640 of 104 sitesLast 4 weeks
Requests1.9M5% of all crawler requests13 weeks, 47 sites
Per site63a weekMedian where it visitsLast 4 weeks

Blocking YouBot can keep your pages out of You.com answers.

You.com has not documented whether YouBot follows robots.txt, so a rule is a request, not a guarantee.

Block YouBot
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /
Allow YouBot
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /
User agentMozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot (+http://www.you.com))

Is it really YouBot?

Anyone can send the YouBot name. Here is how to check a request that carries it.

How to check
1There is no address list to matchYou.com does not publish addresses for YouBot, so a matching name is a clue, not proof.
2Never count a secret-file requestA request for /.env or /.git is not a crawl, whatever name it carries.
See every fake crawler

Common questions

What is YouBot?

YouBot is You.com's search crawler. Reported You.com crawler string associated with web search and AI answer retrieval.

How do I block YouBot?

Add a directive to your robots.txt: "User-agent: YouBot" followed by "Disallow: /". You.com has not documented whether YouBot follows robots.txt, so a rule is a request, not a guarantee.

Does blocking YouBot hide me from AI?

No single bot rule hides a site from every AI product. The former operator page is no longer available, so a matching string should not be attributed to You.com without separate verification.