YouBot
You.com's search / answer indexing crawler.
Quick answer
YouBot is the web crawler that powers You.com's own search engine. It automatically discovers and indexes pages across the web so You.com can return real-time, accurate search results to the people using its own independent search engine every single day.
What it does
YouBot automatically discovers and indexes web pages to provide the real-time search results that power You.com, a search engine with its own index separate from Google, Bing, or any single AI lab's training crawler. You.com states that YouBot fully respects robots.txt directives, including rules written for its specific user agent and crawl-delay settings that control how fast it crawls. One operational detail worth knowing is that YouBot caches a site's robots.txt file for 30 minutes, so a change to the file can take up to that long to actually affect YouBot's behavior. You.com publishes a single IP range for YouBot, 68.67.112.0/24, so site owners can confirm its traffic against that published range alongside reverse DNS or signature-based checks.
Facts
Operator
You.com
Robots token
YouBot
User agent string(s)
- 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
Purpose
Search / answer indexing
Respects robots.txt
Yes
From You.com's documentation, checked Oct 2026.
Should you block it?
Disallowing YouBot removes a site from You.com's search index entirely, which matters to a brand that gets any meaningful traffic or visibility from that search engine, even though it has a smaller audience than Google or Bing. Because You.com fully respects robots.txt, including user-agent specific rules and crawl-delay, a site has fine-grained control if it wants to allow some paths while blocking others rather than an all-or-nothing choice. The tradeoff is mostly about whether a brand values showing up in You.com's results at all; for most sites this is a smaller consideration than visibility in major AI assistants or the dominant search engines, but it costs little to leave YouBot allowed if there is no specific reason to block it. Site owners making a change should remember YouBot caches robots.txt for 30 minutes, so a new rule will not apply immediately.
How to block it
Add this to robots.txt to block YouBot: User-agent: YouBot Disallow: / YouBot caches a site's robots.txt for 30 minutes, so this change can take up to that long to take effect.
Frequently asked questions
What does YouBot do?
You.com says YouBot automatically discovers and indexes web pages to power real-time, accurate search results for You.com.
Does YouBot respect robots.txt?
Yes. You.com says YouBot fully respects robots.txt directives, including user-agent specific rules and crawl-delay settings.
How fast does a robots.txt change take effect for YouBot?
YouBot caches robots.txt for 30 minutes, so a change can take up to that long to apply.
Related
- AI crawler directory — every AI crawler's robots.txt token, purpose and facts in one place.
- Free AI crawler checker — check which AI crawlers a domain's robots.txt actually allows or blocks.
- Glossary — definitions of the AI-visibility terms that come up alongside crawler behavior.
Sources
- YouBot automatically discovers and indexes web pages to provide real-time, accurate search results for You.com users. Source: https://docs.you.com/youbot (checked Oct 2026)
- YouBot fully respects robots.txt directives, including user-agent specific rules and crawl-delay settings. Source: https://docs.you.com/youbot (checked Oct 2026)
- Legitimate YouBot requests originate from the IP range 68.67.112.0/24. Source: https://docs.you.com/youbot (checked Oct 2026)
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