AI crawler · You.com · AI search index
YouBot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
YouBot is You.com's AI search crawler. Discovers and indexes pages for the You.com search engine. In our 13 October 2026 study, 234 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.0%) disallow YouBot. Part of the AI crawler list.
What YouBot does
Operator: You.com. Job: AI search index. Obeys robots.txt.
“It respects robots.txt directives and crawl rate preferences to ensure minimal impact on web servers while maintaining comprehensive coverage of the web.”
YouBot user agent
robots.txt token: YouBot (matched case-insensitively).
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot; env:prod) Chrome/X.X.X.X Safari/537.36robots.txt: allow or block YouBot
Allow
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /Block
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /Affects AI answers and citations. Blocking it keeps your pages out of the index You.com's AI search answers cite. It is not a training crawler.
Once a group names YouBot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block YouBot
Disallow YouBot in robots.txt
10.0%
234 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 234 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.0%) disallow YouBot.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way YouBot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for YouBot
- Finds the group YouBot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is YouBot?+
YouBot is You.com's AI search crawler. Discovers and indexes pages for the You.com search engine.
What is YouBot's user agent?+
You.com documents it as: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot; env:prod) Chrome/X.X.X.X Safari/537.36. Match on the token YouBot, since version numbers change.
How do I block YouBot?+
Add "User-agent: YouBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per You.com.
Does blocking YouBot affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it keeps your pages out of the index You.com's AI search answers cite. It is not a training crawler.
How many websites block YouBot?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 234 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.0%) disallow YouBot.