01 · Operator
Who operates YouBot
- Company
- You.com
- Type
- AI search crawler
- Official docs
- you.com
02 · Behavior
What YouBot does
YouBot crawls and indexes public web pages for You.com search. It honors robots.txt, including user-agent rules and crawl-delay. It caches robots.txt for 30 minutes. Requests come from 68.67.112.0/24 and resolve to hostnames under search.you.com.
03 · Impact
Why YouBot matters for your site
If you allow it
- Pages can appear in You.com search and AI answers
- Honors robots.txt and crawl-delay
- Easy to verify by IP and reverse DNS
If you block it
- Adds crawl load without guaranteed referral traffic
- You may not want content used in AI answers
04 · Allow
How to allow YouBot
robots.txt
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "YouBot")
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: YouBot
Allow: /nginx
# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "YouBot") { return 403; }Apache
# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} YouBot [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]05 · Block
How to block YouBot
YouBot follows robots.txt, so one rule is enough. Use a server or CDN rule only to stop spoofed copies.
robots.txt
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "YouBot")
Action: BlockWordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /nginx
# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "YouBot") {
return 403;
}Apache
# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} YouBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>06 · User agents
User agents we see for YouBot
| User agent | Share | Last active | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/you… |
91% | Yesterday | Unverified |
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://you.com/bot) |
8.8% | 2 days ago | Unverified |
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/you… |
0.2% | 2 days ago | Verified |
07 · Verification
Is it really YouBot?
Anyone can copy a user agent. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to search.you.com, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.
IP addresses we saw from verified YouBot requests
| IP range | Share | Last active |
|---|---|---|
68.67.112.49 |
100% | 2 days ago |
Always check against the operator’s current list; ranges change.
FAQ
Questions about YouBot
What is YouBot?
YouBot is You.com's web crawler. It indexes pages to provide real-time search results for You.com users.
How do I verify YouBot?
Genuine requests come from 68.67.112.0/24. Reverse DNS returns youbot-.search.you.com, matching the connecting IP.
Does YouBot respect crawl-delay?
Yes. You.com states that YouBot honors robots.txt rules, including crawl-delay settings.
Last updated Oct 27, 2026