AI crawler index

What is YandexBot?

YandexBot is Yandex's search engine crawler. Yandex's main indexing robot, which builds the index of Yandex Search.

At a glance

Operator	Yandex
Purpose	Search engine
User agent	`Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)`
Obeys robots.txt	Yes, according to the operator
Published IP ranges	Not documented by the operator
How to verify it	Reverse DNS must end in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com, then a forward lookup must return the same IP.
Official documentation	https://yandex.com/bots

Should you block YandexBot?

It is a classic search engine crawler. Blocking it removes you from that search engine and from the products built on its index, so most sites should allow it.

Yandex says some of its other robots may ignore robots.txt, but not YandexBot. Yandex Webmaster also has a tool to check whether an IP belongs to its indexing robots.

How to block or allow YandexBot in robots.txt

Block it everywhere:

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

Allow it everywhere:

User-agent: YandexBot
Allow: /

Rules are matched by the token on the User-agent line. Test the result with the robots.txt tester before you publish it.

Test YandexBot on your robots.txt

How to let YandexBot through a firewall or CDN

robots.txt only tells YandexBot what it may fetch. If a firewall, a CDN or a bot-protection rule blocks the request first, it never reads the file, so allowing it in robots.txt is not enough.

If your firewall can match hostnames, allow requests whose reverse DNS ends in .yandex.ru, .yandex.net or .yandex.com and resolves back to the same IP.

How to verify that a visit is really YandexBot

Anyone can write YandexBot in a user agent, so the user agent alone proves nothing. Take the IP address of the request from your server logs and check it.

Look up the hostname of the IP, then look up that hostname. The first answer must end in .yandex.ru, .yandex.net or .yandex.com, and the second must return the same IP; anything else is an impostor. On Windows, use nslookup instead of host.

host 203.0.113.7
host <hostname>

Check your own site

The AI crawler checker tells you which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the log file analyzer shows how often each one actually visits. For the bigger picture, see what AI crawlers are and the full AI crawler index.

What our data says about YandexBot

Figures we measured on real AI answers and websites. Each one links to its study, with the method, the sample and the date.

2.8%

2.8% of the websites AI cites most in Spain block YandexBot from crawling their site, and 2.4% name it in a robots.txt group of its own.

Sample: 678 websites AI cites for three or more of 43 brands in Spain. Source: Mencoro (November 2026), in Which AI crawlers do the websites AI cites let in?