AI crawler profile
What is YouBot? How to allow or block You.com's crawler
Operator
You.com
Purpose
AI search & live answers
robots.txt
Respects robots.txt
Official docs
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.
Block YouBot with robots.txt
User-agent: YouBot Disallow: /
Explicitly allow YouBot
User-agent: YouBot Allow: /
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
- AI Crawler Access Checker — see whether your current robots.txt allows or blocks YouBot.
- robots.txt Generator for AI Bots — build a robots.txt with per-bot rules for all 28 known AI crawlers.
- AI Bot Log Analyzer — paste server logs and count real YouBot hits, entirely in your browser.
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". 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.
Part of our directory of every known AI crawler, refreshed monthly. Last verified: 2026-07-18.