What is PetalBot?
The crawler for Petal Search. It indexes PC and mobile sites for Petal Search and for content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.
Crawls pages for a classic search index. Blocking it removes you from that search engine.
Huawei's steps say the hostname should be in aspiegel.com, but its own example resolves to petalsearch.com. Removing already indexed pages can take months; urgent requests go to petalbot@huawei.com.
PetalBot user agent
Huawei documents these user agents for PetalBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)Should you block PetalBot?
Allow it unless you want out of that search engine. Blocking a major search crawler removes your pages from its results.
How to block PetalBot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really PetalBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in aspiegel.com or petalsearch.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when PetalBot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Huawei’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.