YouBot

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

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

curl -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.

You.com runs no other agent in this registry.

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.

See whether your robots.txt admits YouBot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.