robots.txtObeys it

YandexBot: Yandex's search crawler

Yandex's main search crawler.

  • Free, no account.
  • A few seconds.
  • Nothing is stored.

YandexBot at a glance

Everything Yandex documents about it, with links to the source.

Operator
Yandex
Type
Search engines
Used for
Yandex search
Obeys robots.txt
Yes. Yandex documents that YandexBot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
robots.txt token
YandexBot
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)
IP addresses
Not published.
Reverse DNS
Resolves to *.yandex.ru, *.yandex.net, *.yandex.com
Documentation
yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/robot-workings/check-yandex-robots

How to block YandexBot

Crawls for a search engine's index. Blocking it removes your pages from that search engine, and from the AI answers built on it (AI Overviews on Googlebot, Copilot on Bingbot).

Block the whole site

Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

Block only some paths

List the paths; everything else stays open to YandexBot.

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /drafts/

Generate a full robots.txt Test it for any URL

How to verify YandexBot

Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.

  1. 1

    Find requests whose user agent contains "YandexBot" in your server or CDN logs.

  2. 2

    Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. A genuine request resolves to a host under yandex.ru or yandex.net or yandex.com, and a forward lookup of that host returns the same IP.

  3. 3

    Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.

Other AI crawlers

Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.

GooglebotBingbotApplebotDuckDuckBotOAI-SearchBotClaude-SearchBotPerplexityBotDuckAssistBotAmzn-SearchBotMistralAI-IndexGPTBotClaudeBotGoogle-ExtendedApplebot-ExtendedCCBotmeta-externalagentBytespiderAmazonbotMistralAI-TrainingChatGPT-UserClaude-UserPerplexity-Usermeta-externalfetcherAmzn-UserMistralAI-User

The full AI crawlers list

Frequently asked questions

Yandex's main search crawler. Yandex runs a family of robots with their own tokens (images, video, news); YandexBot is the one that builds the web index.

Checked against Yandex's documentation on 29 September 2026.

Next: see whether AI recommends you

Letting the right crawlers in is the first step. AskWatch shows what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI answer when buyers ask about your category, and who they name.

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