Search engine crawlers

What is PetalBot?

PetalBot is the crawler of Petal Search. It indexes PC and mobile sites for Petal Search and for content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.

Last verified 2026-09-30 against the operator's documentation. All bots

PetalBot at a glance

Operator: Huawei (Petal Search)
Type: Search engine crawlers
Purpose: Crawls pages for Petal Search and Huawei Assistant.
robots.txt token: PetalBot
Example user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
How to verify: Run a reverse DNS lookup and check that the name ends in petalsearch.com, then run a forward lookup on that name and confirm it returns the same IP.
Reverse DNS: petalsearch.com
Operator documentation: https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot

How often is PetalBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be PetalBot failed verification.

Measured between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be PetalBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block PetalBot?

Allow it if: you have visitors on Huawei devices or Petal Search.
Block it if: you have no audience there and the crawl adds load.
What blocking changes: Your pages drop out of Petal Search and Huawei Assistant.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. The operator says PetalBot complies with robots.txt.

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be PetalBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.