Bytespider

Operator

ByteDance (Toutiao Search)

Type

Search bot

Official page

zhanzhang.toutiao.com

robots.txt token

Bytespider

Follows robots.txt

No, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

The crawler for Toutiao Search, ByteDance's search engine. The page doesn't mention AI training.

头条搜索的爬虫UA为“Bytespider”首写字母为大写

ByteDance (Toutiao Search)

User agent

Requests from Bytespider carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.5668.1446 Mobile Safari/537.36; Bytespider;bytespider@bytedance.com

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Bytespider

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Bytespider

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

Page is in Chinese. It lists IP ranges inline (no JSON file) and says real Bytespider hosts reverse-resolve to *.bytedance.com. The page doesn't say whether Bytespider obeys robots.txt. Its only stated control is the crawl-frequency tool in Toutiao's webmaster platform.

Bytespider的hostname以*.bytedance.com的格式命名，非 *.bytedance.com即为冒充

ByteDance (Toutiao Search)

How Vireo counts Bytespider

Vireo keeps requests from Bytespider out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Bytespider's user agents.

Sources

• ByteDance (Toutiao Search): crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Bytespider information page (bytedance.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)