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Huawei · AI search

PetalBot: Huawei's Petal Search crawler, and how to verify it

PetalBot is the crawler behind Huawei's Petal Search: it indexes PC and mobile sites for the Petal search engine and for content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search. It complies with robots.txt, though removing pages already indexed can take several months. Huawei's docs give two different reverse-DNS hostname patterns, so accept either and confirm with a forward lookup.

robots.txt token
PetalBot
User agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
Operator
Huawei
Type
AI search
What it feeds
Petal Search, plus content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search, all powered by Petal Search.
Follows robots.txt
Yes. Huawei says PetalBot complies with the robots protocol, and robots.txt can block all or part of a site. Removal from the index can take several months; urgent requests go to petalbot@huawei.com.
How to verify it
Reverse DNS lookup on the IP, then a forward DNS lookup on the hostname to confirm it returns the same IP. Huawei's docs show both petalbot.*.aspiegel.com and petalbot-{ip}.petalsearch.com hostnames. (list)

Should you block PetalBot?

Blocking PetalBot makes your pages unsearchable in Petal Search and removes them from Huawei Assistant and AI Search recommendations. That matters mainly if your audience uses Huawei devices. If you only want it to skip some sections, use a partial disallow instead of a full block.

Block PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /
Allow PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /

Add these lines to /robots.txt at your site root. A group naming PetalBot replaces your User-agent: * rules for it, so repeat any paths you also want it to skip.

Live check

Is PetalBot allowed on your site?

What PetalBot feeds

Huawei uses one crawler for several products. According to the PetalBot page, PetalBot indexes PC and mobile sites for the Petal search engine, and that index also supplies content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search. There is no separate AI token to block or allow, unlike Google's split between Googlebot and Google-Extended. One rule decides all of them.

Huawei describes PetalBot as a search crawler, which puts it in the same group as Bingbot and Applebot.

What blocking it does, and what it doesn't

A disallow stops PetalBot crawling, and over time your pages leave Petal Search and Huawei's assistant recommendations. Over time is the key part: Huawei says removal can take several months, so robots.txt isn't a quick takedown. Email petalbot@huawei.com if you need something gone faster. Blocking PetalBot has no effect on other search engines.

How to block or limit PetalBot

Huawei says robots.txt can block all or part of a site:

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /cart/

Use Disallow: / to block it everywhere. The desktop and mobile crawlers share the PetalBot token, so one group covers both user agents. Add the rule on each subdomain, because every host has its own robots.txt. The robots.txt checker shows how your file treats PetalBot.

Verifying a visit, and the hostname contradiction

The desktop user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot) (note there's no space after compatible;). The mobile one is Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot).

Huawei publishes no IP list. Its method is a reverse DNS lookup followed by a forward lookup, but the page is inconsistent about what the hostname should be. The prose says petalbot.*.aspiegel.com; the worked example shows a name like petalbot- followed by the IP under petalsearch.com. The old aspiegel.com/petalbot page now returns 404, so you can't settle it there either. The safe rule:

  1. Run a reverse lookup on the source IP.
  2. Accept a hostname that starts with petalbot and ends in either aspiegel.com or petalsearch.com.
  3. Run a forward lookup on that hostname and confirm it returns the original IP. Without this step, anyone who controls their own reverse DNS could fake the name.

Questions

Which hostname should a real PetalBot IP resolve to?
Huawei's page contradicts itself: the text says petalbot followed by a subdomain of aspiegel.com, while its worked example shows a petalbot hostname under petalsearch.com. Accept either, and only trust it if a forward lookup of that hostname returns the original IP.
I blocked PetalBot. Why are my pages still in Petal Search?
Huawei says removal from the index can take several months. For urgent removals, email petalbot@huawei.com, the contact on its PetalBot page.
Does PetalBot use a different user agent on mobile?
Yes. Besides the desktop string, Huawei lists a mobile one that begins with "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;)" and ends with "(compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)". One PetalBot group in robots.txt covers both.
Does Huawei publish PetalBot's IP ranges?
No IP list is published. Use the reverse and forward DNS check instead.
Is PetalBot an AI crawler?
It's a search crawler, but Huawei says the same index feeds recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search, so blocking it affects those AI features too.

Related crawlers

Sources

Checked against these pages on 2026-10-18. Operators change their crawlers; check the source before relying on a detail.