Petal Bot

Operator

Huawei (Petal Search)

Type

Crawler

Official page

webmaster.petalsearch.com

robots.txt token

PetalBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Huawei (Petal Search).

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Petal Search's crawler. It indexes PC and mobile sites for Petal Search and for recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.

PetalBot is an automatic program of the Petal search engine.

Huawei (Petal Search)

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: No explicit frequency provided.

User agent

Requests from Petal Bot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://aspiegel.com/petalbot)

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

PetalBot

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 Petal Bot

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: PetalBot
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.

User-agent: PetalBot Disallow: /

Huawei (Petal Search)

PetalBot complies with the Internet robots protocol.

Huawei (Petal Search)

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

Verify by reverse DNS: the hostname should be in petalsearch.com.

Verify that the domain name is in petalsearch.com.

Huawei (Petal Search)

How Vireo counts Petal Bot

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

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

Sources

• Huawei (Petal Search): crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Petal Bot information page (aspiegel.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)