Does YouBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that YouBot 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.

How do I verify a request really came from YouBot?

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. You.com documents the crawler and honours robots.txt but publishes no address list. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

How do I block YouBot?

Add the YouBot 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.

IPScanner

AI search crawlers

YouBot

YouBot is a bot operated by You that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Retrieves data used for You.com web search engine and LLMs. 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.

YouBot at a glance

Reference data for the YouBot crawler
User agent	`YouBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	You
Purpose	Scrapes data for search engine and LLMs.
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	None published, user agent only You.com documents the crawler and honours robots.txt but publishes no address list. https://about.you.com/youbot/
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`YouBot`
Operator documentation	https://about.you.com/youbot/

Retrieves data used for You.com web search engine and LLMs.

robots.txt

Allow or block YouBot

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking YouBot 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.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really YouBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy YouBot precisely because site owners allow it. You.com documents the crawler and honours robots.txt but publishes no address list.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

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Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ