AI crawler index

What is YouBot?

YouBot is You.com's crawler for AI search. Crawls and indexes pages to power the You.com search engine.

At a glance

Operator	You.com
Purpose	AI search
User agent	`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`
Obeys robots.txt	Yes, according to the operator
Published IP ranges	Not documented by the operator
How to verify it	Web Bot Auth signatures, reverse DNS to youbot-*.search.you.com, or the IP range in You.com's docs.
Official documentation	https://you.com/docs/youbot

Should you block YouBot?

It builds the index an AI search engine cites from. Blocking it can remove your pages from that engine's answers and links, so if you want to be cited there, allow it.

It honors robots.txt, including Crawl-delay, and caches it for 30 minutes. You.com does not state whether the data trains AI models.

How to block or allow YouBot in robots.txt

Block it everywhere:

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Allow it everywhere:

User-agent: YouBot
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 YouBot on your robots.txt

How to let YouBot through a firewall or CDN

robots.txt only tells YouBot 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 .search.you.com and resolves back to the same IP.

How to verify that a visit is really YouBot

Anyone can write YouBot 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 .search.you.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 YouBot

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

5.3%

5.3% of the websites AI cites most in Spain block YouBot from crawling their site, and 5.2% 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?