01 · Operator
Who operates AspiegelBot
- Company
- Huawei (Aspiegel)
02 · Behavior
What AspiegelBot does
AspiegelBot crawled and indexed websites for Huawei's search engine. Hosting company Hypernode reported it as aggressive and said it ignored robots.txt. Huawei's crawler now identifies as PetalBot.
03 · Impact
Why AspiegelBot matters for your site
If you allow it
- Indexing for Huawei's search engine on Huawei devices
If you block it
- Reported to ignore robots.txt
- Reported heavy crawl load on online stores
- Renamed, so current traffic with this name is suspect
04 · Allow
How to allow AspiegelBot
robots.txt
User-agent: AspiegelBot
Allow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "AspiegelBot")
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: AspiegelBot
Allow: /nginx
# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "AspiegelBot") { return 403; }Apache
# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AspiegelBot [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]05 · Block
How to block AspiegelBot
AspiegelBot has been reported to ignore robots.txt. Block it at your CDN or web server as well.
robots.txt
# AspiegelBot has been reported to ignore robots.txt.
# Add a Cloudflare, nginx or Apache rule as well.
User-agent: AspiegelBot
Disallow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "AspiegelBot")
Action: BlockWordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: AspiegelBot
Disallow: /nginx
# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "AspiegelBot") {
return 403;
}Apache
# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AspiegelBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>06 · User agents
User agents we see for AspiegelBot
The user agent published by the operator:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; AspiegelBot)07 · Verification
Is it really AspiegelBot?
AspiegelBot’s operator publishes no IP ranges or hostnames, so requests cannot be verified. Treat the user agent as a claim, and watch your logs for unusual request rates.
FAQ
Questions about AspiegelBot
Is AspiegelBot still active?
Huawei's crawler was renamed from AspiegelBot to PetalBot. Requests using the old name are likely old or spoofed.
Who operated AspiegelBot?
It was operated by Huawei to index sites for its search engine.
Should I block AspiegelBot?
Blocking is reasonable. It was reported to ignore robots.txt, so use server or firewall rules.
Last reviewed Oct 7, 2026