AI search crawlers
PetalBot is a bot operated by Huawei that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Operated by Huawei to provide search and AI assistant services. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.
Request says
"PetalBot"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for PetalBot. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | PetalBotToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Huawei |
| Purpose | Used to provide recommendations in Hauwei assistant and AI search services. |
| Respects robots.txt | Honours |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone published, user agent only Huawei documents the crawler in its webmaster help. Traffic originates from Huawei Cloud ranges but no per-bot list is published. |
| Crawl pattern | No explicit frequency provided. |
| Robots.txt tokens | PetalBot |
| Operator documentation | None published |
Operated by Huawei to provide search and AI assistant services.
PetalBot crawls from Huawei Cloud addresses in Singapore, which is why it shows up as Singapore traffic in server logs and Cloudflare analytics. China and Singapore bot traffic separates the cloud bots from real visitors.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking PetalBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
PetalBot is a bot operated by Huawei that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Operated by Huawei to provide search and AI assistant services. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.
Yes. The operator documents that PetalBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.
You cannot, at least not from the request itself. Huawei documents the crawler in its webmaster help. Traffic originates from Huawei Cloud ranges but no per-bot list is published. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.
Add the PetalBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.
Blocking PetalBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.