YouBot

What is YouBot?

About

YouBot is a web crawler used by You.com to index search results that allow their AI Assistant to answer user questions. The assistant's answers normally contain references to the website as inline sources. You can see how often YouBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

AI search crawlers do not adhere to a fixed visitation schedule for websites. The frequency of visits varies widely based on many factors, and can even happen on-demand in response to a user query.

Type

AI Search Crawler
Indexes web content for AI-powered search results

Detail

Operated By You.com
Last Updated 6 minutes ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

7%
7% of top websites are blocking YouBot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
YouBot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Search Crawlers

Get These Insights for Your Website
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block YouBot?

Probably not. AI search crawlers power AI search engines, which are a useful way for users to discover your website. AI search engine assistants usually cite their sources and provide links to their results.

How Do I Block YouBot?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block YouBot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot (+http://www.you.com)) 
# robots.txt
# This should block YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

References