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.

Agent Type

Expected Behavior

AI search crawlers index websites to power AI-driven search engines, similar to how traditional search crawlers work for Google or Bing. They regularly scan sites to build and update their index, with crawl frequency varying based on content freshness, site authority, and perceived importance. Unlike traditional search engines with relatively predictable crawl schedules, AI search crawlers may visit more sporadically or in bursts depending on their algorithmic indexing priorities.

Detail

Insights

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.

# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: YouBot # https://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.

References

• https://about.you.com/youbot/