Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate LIX0x561E9F01UNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family AI Scrapers›Species YouBot
Specimen file · The AI Aviary

YouBot

Tu quaerens

What is YouBot?

The crawler for You.com, an AI search and chat assistant. It is operated by You.com and identifies itself as YouBot.

Temperament: personable. Introduces itself as "You". Conversations get confusing.

Operator
You.com
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block YouBot ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot (+http://www.you.com))

You.com does not publish a way to verify YouBot's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it. Read You.com's documentation.

§ II.

How to block YouBot

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from YouBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block YouBot from the whole site
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

The networks YouBot's visits came from:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does YouBot respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking YouBot hurt my search rankings?

No. YouBot isn't used by Google or Bing to rank pages. Blocking it only affects whether You.com collects your content.

How often does YouBot visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

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