YandexFavicons

Operator

Yandex LLC

Type

Search bot

Official page

yandex.com

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

User agent

Requests from YandexFavicons carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexFavicons/1.0; +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 Vireo counts YandexFavicons

Vireo keeps requests from YandexFavicons 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 YandexFavicons's user agents.

Sources

• YandexFavicons information page (yandex.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)