YouBot
What is YouBot?
About
YouBot is a web crawler used by You.com to index search results that allow their AI Assistant to answer user questions. The assistant's answers normally contain references to the website as inline sources. You can see how often YouBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.
Expected Behavior
AI search crawlers do not adhere to a fixed visitation schedule for websites. The frequency of visits varies widely based on many factors, and can even happen on-demand in response to a user query.
Type
Detail
| Operated By | You.com |
| Last Updated | 17 hours ago |
Insights
Top Website Robots.txts
Country of Origin
Global Traffic
The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Search Crawlers
Robots.txt
Should I Block YouBot?
Probably not. AI search crawlers power AI search engines, which are a useful way for users to discover your website. AI search engine assistants usually cite their sources and provide links to their results.
How Do I Block YouBot?
You can block YouBot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.
| User Agent String | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot (+http://www.you.com)) |
# In your robots.txt ...
User-agent: YouBot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/youbot
Disallow: /
⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.