Agent Ready Crawlers

The field guide to every AI crawler and agent at the door, and the vendors who decide who gets in.

Search index crawler from You.com

YouBot

In short

YouBot is You.com's search index crawler. The token to write in robots.txt is YouBot. The operator publishes nothing a site can check. 10.3 percent of 5,938 top-10,000 sites with a parsed robots.txt disallow it at the root (crawl of 2026-11-04). Verisoul reports YouBot signs its requests, but You.com publishes no key directory or documentation we could read.

Operator
You.com Vendor profile: You.com
Purpose
Search index All search index rows. Builds a search index that sends visitors back. Refusing it removes pages from that product.
User-agent string
No exact string is published. What the operator or a third party says: Not published by You.com
robots.txt token
YouBot Matched case-insensitively (RFC 9309). The token and the user-agent string are different things.
Respects robots.txt

No documentation

operator publishes no bot documentation (checked 2026-11-04). you.com/youbot redirects to a sign-in page. Source, read 2026-11-04.

Operator publishes no bot documentation (checked 2026-11-04).

Verification

Nothing published

The operator publishes no list, reverse DNS pattern or key directory a site owner can check. Documentation, read 2026-11-04.

IP ranges
Not published.
Rate behaviour
Not published.
Block rate

10.3% of 5,938 top-10,000 sites with a parsed robots.txt disallow YouBot at the root (610 sites). 6.4% name it; 3.8% refuse it only through a * group. Rank 17 of 31 tokens measured.

Across all 8,624 parsed robots.txt files in the crawl: 7.3% (4.6% named). Crawl of 2026-11-04; report.

Documentation
Operator publishes no bot documentation (checked 2026-11-04). Closest page read.

Note. Verisoul reports YouBot signs its requests, but You.com publishes no key directory or documentation we could read.

Allow and refuse lines

To allow YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

To refuse YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Refusing or allowing in robots.txt states a preference. Enforcement of a refusal belongs in your WAF; see how to verify the identity above.

You.com in the Verification Ledger

Publishes nothing we could read; a detection vendor reports signed requests. All operators.

IP lists
publishes nothing
Reverse DNS
publishes nothing
Key directory
publishes nothing
Cloudflare
not checked
Visa TAP registry
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)
Mastercard Agent Pay
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-11-04