You.com · AI search
YouBot: You.com's search crawler, and how to verify it
YouBot is You.com's web crawler, the bot that powers the You.com search engine and its real-time results. It follows robots.txt, including user-agent-specific rules and Crawl-delay, and caches the file for 30 minutes. Blocking it removes your pages from what You.com can index and show its users.
- robots.txt token
YouBot- 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- Operator
- You.com
- Type
- AI search
- What it feeds
- The You.com search engine, providing comprehensive, real-time search results for You.com users.
- Follows robots.txt
- Yes. You.com says YouBot fully respects robots.txt, including user-agent-specific rules and crawl-delay settings. It caches robots.txt for 30 minutes.
- How to verify it
- Cryptographic request signatures (Web Bot Auth / HTTP Message Signatures with an Ed25519 key, recommended), forward-confirmed reverse DNS to a search.you.com hostname, or the IP range 68.67.112.0/24. (list)
Should you block YouBot?
Blocking YouBot means You.com can no longer index your pages, so they drop out of You.com search and the AI answers built on it. You.com's docs don't mention AI training, so a block is a search decision, not a training opt-out. Most sites that want to be found should allow it.
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /
Add these lines to /robots.txt at your site root. A group naming YouBot replaces your User-agent: * rules for it, so repeat any paths you also want it to skip.
Live check
Is YouBot allowed on your site?
Where YouBot fits
You.com's YouBot page describes a single crawler, so there's no family of tokens to untangle. YouBot is a search crawler in the same group as Bingbot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot: it builds the index You.com answers from. It is not a training crawler like GPTBot or CCBot, at least according to everything You.com publishes about it.
What blocking it does, and what it doesn't
A disallow stops YouBot crawling, so You.com can't index or surface those pages. That affects You.com search and its AI answers, nothing else. It doesn't touch other search engines or AI crawlers. Because You.com's docs say nothing about training, blocking YouBot isn't a meaningful training opt-out; block training crawlers by their own tokens instead.
How to block, allow or slow YouBot
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /private/
Crawl-delay: 5
You.com says YouBot honors user-agent-specific groups and Crawl-delay, so you can rate-limit it rather than block it. Use Disallow: / for a full block. Remember that a group naming YouBot replaces your User-agent: * rules for it, so repeat any shared paths you want it to skip. robots.txt is cached for 30 minutes, so a change applies within about half an hour. Each subdomain needs its own file; the robots.txt checker shows how yours treats YouBot.
Verifying a visit
The documented user agent is 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, where X.X.X.X stands for the Chrome version. The docs link in it, docs.you.com/youbot, now redirects to you.com/docs/youbot. You.com offers three checks:
- Signatures (recommended). YouBot signs requests using Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, the scheme Cloudflare supports) with an Ed25519 key. Its public keys are in the signatures directory.
- Reverse DNS. The IP should resolve to a hostname of the form
youbot-followed by the IP's octets joined by hyphens, under.search.you.com. Then resolve that hostname and confirm it returns the same IP. - IP range. You.com gives
68.67.112.0/24inline on its docs page; there's no separate IP file.
Signatures are the strongest of the three, because an IP or hostname shows where a request came from, while a valid signature shows YouBot sent it.
Questions
- Is YouBot used to train AI models?
- You.com's YouBot documentation describes it only as the crawler behind You.com search and doesn't mention AI training. Treat it as a search crawler.
- How quickly does YouBot pick up a robots.txt change?
- You.com says YouBot caches robots.txt for 30 minutes, so a change should apply within about half an hour.
- What does Chrome/X.X.X.X mean in the user agent?
- It's a placeholder in You.com's docs for the Chrome version, which changes over time. Match on the YouBot/1.0 token, not the full string.
- I see a different YouBot user agent in third-party lists. Which is right?
- Some sites list an older form, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://you.com/bot)", which doesn't match You.com's current docs. Rely on the string in You.com's documentation and verify the request itself.
- Which verification method should I use?
- You.com recommends cryptographic signatures, because they prove the request came from YouBot rather than just from an address. Reverse DNS and the 68.67.112.0/24 range are simpler fallbacks.
Related crawlers
Sources
Checked against these pages on 2026-10-18. Operators change their crawlers; check the source before relying on a detail.