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AI crawler profile

What is YouBot? How to allow or block You.com's crawler

User-agent string to match in robots.txt and server logs: YouBot

Operator

You.com

Purpose

AI search & live answers

robots.txt

Respects robots.txt

Official docs

You.com documentation ↗

YouBot indexes and retrieves content for You.com, one of the earlier AI-native search engines, whose answers cite web sources. It's a smaller traffic source than the big assistants, but the same logic applies: blocking it trades a bit of crawl load for absence from its cited answers.

Does YouBot respect robots.txt?

You.com documents YouBot and states it honors robots.txt rules.

Verify it's really YouBot

You.com publishes no IP-range file for YouBot, so it can only be identified by its user-agent string — which anything can send. Treat traffic claiming this agent as unverified, and prefer a reverse-DNS check where the operator documents one before acting on it.

Block YouBot with robots.txt

robots.txt — block
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Explicitly allow YouBot

robots.txt — allow
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

Block YouBot at the server or CDN

robots.txt is the right first step for YouBot, since You.com honors it. Use these only if you want the block enforced rather than requested — for example to stop agents spoofing the user agent. Matching on the user-agent string still trusts a self-declared header — and no IP-range file exists for this agent, so treat it as best-effort.

nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "YouBot") {
    return 403;
}
apache — .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} YouBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
cloudflare — WAF expression
(http.user_agent contains "YouBot")

Find YouBot in your server logs

shell
grep -i "YouBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | wc -l

Should you block YouBot?

For most sites, no. YouBot powers visibility: blocking it removes your pages from the cited answers You.com's assistant shows its users — the AI-era equivalent of de-indexing yourself from a search engine. Block it only if you deliberately don't want that audience. Our guide on blocking AI bots covers the trade-offs in detail.

Check and monitor YouBot on your site

Related reading

Frequently asked questions

What is YouBot?

YouBot is You.com's agent for AI search and live answers. Crawls and fetches pages for You.com's AI search answers.

Does YouBot respect robots.txt?

You.com documents YouBot and states it honors robots.txt rules.

How do I block YouBot?

Add "User-agent: YouBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt file. The change takes effect the next time the bot fetches your robots.txt.

Does blocking YouBot hurt my Google rankings?

No. YouBot is separate from Googlebot, which handles Google Search indexing. Blocking YouBot has no effect on your traditional search rankings, but it does remove your pages from the AI answers You.com's assistant serves to its users.

How can I tell if YouBot is crawling my site?

Search your server access logs for the string "YouBot" — for example: grep -i "YouBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | wc -l. Our free AI Bot Log Analyzer does this in your browser: paste a log file and it counts hits per AI crawler, including YouBot, with per-path breakdowns.

How do I use YouBot?

You don't — YouBot isn't a tool you run. It's You.com's own crawler, operated by You.com, that visits your site from their infrastructure. The only control you have over it is whether you allow or block it, via robots.txt or a server rule. If you're looking to crawl other sites yourself, you'd write your own crawler or use a crawling library; sending "YouBot" as your user agent would be impersonating You.com.

Where is the official You.com documentation for YouBot?

You.com publishes it at https://about.you.com/youbot/. That page is the authoritative source for the user-agent string and You.com's stated crawling policy.

Part of our directory of every known AI crawler, refreshed monthly. Last verified: 2026-08-14.