YouBot

Operator

You.com

Type

AI Search Crawler

Official page

you.com

robots.txt token

YouBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to You.com.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Crawls and indexes pages for the You.com search engine.

YouBot is the web crawler that powers the You.com search engine.

You.com

User agent

Requests from YouBot carry user agents like these:

YouBot (+http://www.you.com)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://about.you.com/youbot/)

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

YouBot

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 YouBot

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: YouBot
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: YouBot Disallow: /

You.com

Yes, YouBot fully respects robots.txt directives, including user-agent specific rules and crawl-delay settings.

You.com

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

No JSON IP list. The page gives one range, 68.67.112.0/24, plus reverse DNS (youbot-*.search.you.com) and Web Bot Auth signatures. robots.txt is cached for 30 minutes.

Legitimate YouBot requests originate from 68.67.112.0/24.

You.com

How Vireo counts YouBot

Vireo keeps requests from YouBot 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 YouBot's user agents.

Sources

• You.com: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• YouBot information page (about.you.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)