YouBot
You.com · Answer index · robots.txt token youbot
3% of 30,177 measured domains disallow youbot in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 17.4% of 30,185 reachable domains refuse an AI crawler user agent at the network edge on two consecutive probes from different locations - a refusal the site's own robots.txt does not declare and its owner often has not chosen.
Measured 2026-10-06 by direct request to every domain in the corpus. Method: how this is measured. Reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
Cite as: Crawl Census, "YouBot blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/youbot
What it is definition
Indexes pages for You.com search results and the AI answers built on that index.
YouBot is operated by You.com and classified here as answer index. These agents build the index an answer engine queries at question time. Disallowing one removes the site from those answers and from the citations that link back to it. Training is governed by separate tokens, so this is the expensive block, not the protective one.
Disallowing youbot removes the site from the index You.com queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
- robots.txt token
- youbot
- Operator
- You.com
- Purpose
- Answer index
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://docs.you.com/youbot
Identity on the wire exact string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Safari/537.36curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' https://example.com/Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.
How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt
User-agent: youbot
Allow: /Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.
User-agent: youbot
Disallow: /Disallowing youbot removes the site from the index You.com queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
Sites that block it 60 shown
See every measured domain that blocks YouBot
This list is served from a cache rebuilt just now. It is discarded the moment a rescan records a policy change for this agent, so a site that has just changed its robots.txt will drop off it within one scan rather than waiting for the cache to expire.
Compare You.com
You.com runs no other agent in this registry.
Common questions answered
Does blocking YouBot remove me from You.com?
Yes, in effect. YouBot builds the index You.com reads at question time, so disallowing it takes the site out of those answers and out of the citations that link back to it. This is the block that costs traffic.
How do I verify YouBot requests are genuine?
You.com publishes neither reverse DNS names nor address ranges for YouBot, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be authenticated. The string is trivially spoofed and is routinely reused by unrelated scrapers. Treat it as a hint, rate-limit by source address, and do not grant it access you would not grant an anonymous client.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits YouBot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.