IbouBot User Agent: What It Is & How to Block It

01 · Operator

Who operates IbouBot

Company: Babbar (Ibou)
Type: Search engine crawler
Official docs: ibou.io

02 · Behavior

What IbouBot does

IbouBot discovers publicly accessible pages and indexes them for the Ibou search engine. Ibou states it waits 5 seconds between requests to the same host. It aims for about 0.4 requests per second per domain at most.

03 · Impact

Why IbouBot matters for your site

If you allow it

Pages can appear in Ibou search results
Low documented crawl rate
Honors robots.txt and crawl-delay

If you block it

Ibou is a small search engine with limited referral traffic
Adds crawl load with little return for some sites

04 · Allow

How to allow IbouBot

robots.txt

User-agent: IbouBot
Allow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "IbouBot")
Action:     Skip › All Super Bot Fight Mode rules

# Also check Security › Bots: "Block AI bots" can block it regardless of robots.txt.

WordPress

# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: IbouBot
Allow: /

nginx

# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "IbouBot") { return 403; }

Apache

# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} IbouBot [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

05 · Block

How to block IbouBot

IbouBot follows robots.txt, so one rule is enough. Use a server or CDN rule only to stop spoofed copies.

robots.txt

User-agent: IbouBot
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "IbouBot")
Action:     Block

WordPress

# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: IbouBot
Disallow: /

nginx

# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "IbouBot") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} IbouBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

06 · User agents

User agents we see for IbouBot

The user agent published by the operator:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IbouBot/1.0; +bot@ibou.io; +https://ibou.io/iboubot.html)

07 · Verification

Is it really IbouBot?

Anyone can copy a user agent. Real IbouBot requests come from the IP ranges published at ibou.io/iboubot-ip-ranges.json. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to ibou.io, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.

FAQ

Questions about IbouBot

What is IbouBot?

IbouBot is the crawler of the Ibou search engine. It indexes public pages so people can find them in Ibou search.

Does IbouBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Ibou states that IbouBot follows robots.txt disallow rules and the crawl-delay directive.

How do I verify a real IbouBot request?

Check the IP against Ibou's published IP range file, or run a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup. The hostname must end in ibou.io.

IbouBot is Babbar (Ibou)’s search engine crawler