ibou-search User Agent: What It Is & How to Block It

01 · Operator

Who operates ibou-search

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

02 · Behavior

What ibou-search does

ibou-search finds publicly accessible pages and indexes them for the ibou search engine. ibou states it does not use the data to train AI models. It waits 5 seconds between requests to the same host. It is listed separately from IbouBot, with its own user agent and robots.txt token.

03 · Impact

Why ibou-search matters for your site

If you allow it

Your pages can appear in ibou search
It follows robots.txt and Crawl-delay
Requests can be verified by reverse DNS and an IP list

If you block it

ibou is a small search engine with limited traffic
It adds crawl load

04 · Allow

How to allow ibou-search

robots.txt

User-agent: ibou-search
Allow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "ibou-search")
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: ibou-search
Allow: /

nginx

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

Apache

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

05 · Block

How to block ibou-search

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

robots.txt

User-agent: ibou-search
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "ibou-search")
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: ibou-search
Disallow: /

nginx

# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "ibou\-search") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

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

06 · User agents

User agents we see for ibou-search

The user agent published by the operator:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ibou-search/2.0; +https://ibou.com/crawlers.html)

Other Babbar (Ibou) bots

07 · Verification

Is it really ibou-search?

Anyone can copy a user agent. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to ibou.io, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.

FAQ

Questions about ibou-search

What is ibou-search?

It is a crawler of the ibou search engine. It discovers and indexes public pages.

Does ibou-search respect robots.txt?

Yes. ibou states it follows Disallow and Crawl-delay. Use the token ibou-search.

How can I verify ibou-search?

Use forward-confirmed reverse DNS; the hostname must end in ibou.io. ibou also publishes its IP ranges as a JSON file.

ibou-search is Babbar (Ibou)’s search engine crawler