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# YouBot

> YouBot is an AI search crawler run by You.com. It discovers and indexes web pages to provide search results for You.com users.

- Operator: You.com
- Kind: AI search crawler
- robots.txt token: YouBot
- Follows robots.txt: yes
- Source: https://you.com/docs/youbot (checked 2026-11-05)
- Page: https://invisit.dev/bots/youbot

## What is YouBot?

It discovers and indexes web pages to provide search results for You.com users.

Indexes pages so an AI search product can cite and link them in answers. Blocking it usually means you stop showing up as a source there.

You.com says YouBot honors Crawl-delay, caches robots.txt for 30 minutes, and sends requests from 68.67.112.0/24.

- [You.com’s documentation](https://you.com/docs/youbot)

## YouBot user agent

You.com documents this user agent for YouBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.

```
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot; env:prod) Chrome/X.X.X.X Safari/537.36
```

## Should you block YouBot?

Usually allow it. It is how an AI search product finds pages to cite and link, so blocking it trades away being a source in those answers.

## How to block YouBot 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.

YouBot also signs requests with Web Bot Auth; You.com publishes its keys at https://you.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

```
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /
```

- [Build a robots.txt for AI bots](https://invisit.dev/tools/robots-txt-generator)

## How to verify a request is really YouBot

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 `search.you.com`, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.

## See when YouBot 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.

- [Track crawlers with invisit](https://invisit.dev/docs/server/sdk#crawler-reads)

## Common questions

### What is YouBot?

YouBot is an AI search crawler run by You.com. It discovers and indexes web pages to provide search results for You.com users.

### Is YouBot safe to block?

Usually allow it. It is how an AI search product finds pages to cite and link, so blocking it trades away being a source in those answers.

### How do I block YouBot?

Add “User-agent: YouBot” followed by “Disallow: /” to your robots.txt.