YandexBot

Operator

Yandex

Type

Search bot

Official page

yandex.com

robots.txt token

YandexBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Yandex.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Yandex's main indexing robot.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots) The main indexing robot.

Yandex

User agent

Requests from YandexBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)

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

(Yandex(?:(?:\.Gazeta |Accessibility|Com|Mobile|MobileScreenShot|RenderResources|Screenshot|Sprav)?Bot|(?:AdNet|Antivirus|Blogs|Calendar|Catalog|Dialogs|Direct(?:Dyn)?|Favicons|ForDomain|ImageResizer|Images|Market|Media(?:naBot)?|Metrika|News(?:links)?|OntoDB(?:API)?|Pagechecker|Partner|RCA|SearchShop|(?:News|Site)links|Tracker|Turbo|Userproxy|Verticals|Vertis|Video(?:Parser)?|Webmaster))|YaDirectFetcher)

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 YandexBot

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: YandexBot
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: YandexBot # will be used only by the main indexing bot

Yandex

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots) The main indexing robot. Yes

Yandex

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

The quoted 'Yes' is the 'Takes into account the General rules specified in robots.txt' column. Yandex doesn't publish its crawler IPs, so verify with reverse DNS (yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com). Some other Yandex robots ignore rules aimed at User-agent: *.

To avoid unintentional blocking by site owners, they may ignore the file's restrictive directives robots.txt designed for arbitrary robots ( User-agent: *).

Yandex

How Vireo counts YandexBot

Vireo keeps requests from YandexBot 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 YandexBot's user agents.

Sources

• Yandex: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• YandexBot information page (yandex.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)