What is YouBot?
YouBot is the web crawler that powers the You.com search engine. You.com says it automatically discovers and indexes web pages to provide search results for You.com users.
- Operator
- You.com
- Purpose
- Crawls and indexes pages for the You.com search engine.
- robots.txt token
YouBot- Example 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- How to verify
- You.com documents three checks: a Web Bot Auth signature, a reverse DNS name of the form youbot-….search.you.com, and a source IP in the range 68.67.112.0/24. It recommends the signature.
- Reverse DNS
- search.you.com
- Operator documentation
- https://you.com/docs/youbot
- Last verified
How often is YouBot impersonated?
We have not measured requests claiming to be YouBot yet, so we show no share.
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 YouBot? Check its IP address.
Should you block YouBot?
- Allow it if
- you want your pages in You.com search results.
- Block it if
- you do not want your pages in the You.com index.
- What blocking changes
- You.com says content that is public and not blocked by robots.txt may be crawled and indexed. A Disallow rule keeps YouBot from crawling your pages.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. You.com says YouBot fully respects robots.txt directives, including user-agent specific rules and crawl-delay settings. YouBot caches robots.txt for 30 minutes.
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be YouBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
- 360Spider (360 Search): Crawls pages for the web search of 360 Search (so.com).
- Applebot (Apple): Crawls pages for Spotlight, Siri and Safari search features.
- Baiduspider (Baidu): Crawls pages for Baidu search.
- Bingbot (Microsoft): Crawls pages for Bing search.
- Diffbot (Diffbot): Crawls the web for the Diffbot Knowledge Graph and Diffbot's web search services.
- DuckDuckBot (DuckDuckGo): Crawls pages for DuckDuckGo search.
See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.
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