YandexAdditionalBot

Operator

Yandex LLC

Type

AI Search Crawler

Official page

yandex.com

robots.txt token

YandexAdditional, YandexAdditionalBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Retrieves data used for YandexGPT quick answers features.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Scrapes/analyzes data for the YandexGPT LLM.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from YandexAdditionalBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexAdditionalBot/1.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)

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

YandexAdditional

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 YandexAdditionalBot

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

User-agent: YandexAdditional
User-agent: YandexAdditionalBot
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.

How Vireo counts YandexAdditionalBot

Vireo keeps requests from YandexAdditionalBot 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 YandexAdditionalBot's user agents.

Sources

• YandexAdditionalBot information page (yandex.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)