What is YandexBot?
Yandex's main indexing robot for Yandex Search.
Crawls pages for a classic search index. Blocking it removes you from that search engine.
Several other Yandex robots, such as YandexAccessibilityBot and YandexMobileBot, ignore rules under User-agent: *, so name them directly to restrict them. Yandex does not publish its crawler IP list.
YandexBot user agent
Yandex documents this user agent for YandexBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)Should you block YandexBot?
Allow it unless you want out of that search engine. Blocking a major search crawler removes your pages from its results.
How to block YandexBot 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: YandexBot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really YandexBot
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 yandex.ru or yandex.net or yandex.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when YandexBot 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 Yandex’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.