What is YandexBot?

How often is YandexBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be YandexBot 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 YandexBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block YandexBot?

Allow it if

you have visitors who search with Yandex.

Block it if

you have no audience on Yandex and the crawl adds load.

What blocking changes

Your pages drop out of Yandex search.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Yandex says YandexBot follows the general rules in robots.txt.

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

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