YouBot

Last updated a day ago.

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 set up agent analytics to see when YouBot visits your website.

Detail

Operator	You.com
Documentation	https://about.you.com/youbot/

Type

AI Search Crawler

Indexes web content for AI-powered search results

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.

Insights

YouBot Visiting Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

5% of top websites are blocking YouBot

Learn How →

Access Control

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.

Using Robots.txt

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

User Agent Token	Description
`YouBot`	Should match instances of YouBot

# robots.txt
# This should block YouBot

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt