AI search · You.com

YouBot

The crawler behind You.com’s AI search and answers.

Operator: You.com
Purpose: AI answers. Crawlers that build the indexes AI assistants answer from and cite. Blocking one keeps you out of its answers.
robots.txt token: YouBot
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YouBot (+http://www.you.com))
Documentation: about.you.com/youbot/

Block YouBot

Add a group naming it to /robots.txt. Compliant crawlers stop before requesting any page. A firewall rule on the user agent is the only way to enforce it against crawlers that ignore robots.txt.

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

Allow YouBot when everything else is blocked

A group naming the bot wins over User-agent: *, so an explicit allow lets it in while your catch-all rules stay in place.

User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Does YouBot reach your site?

The checker applies your robots.txt the way YouBot does, then requests your page with the user agent above, alongside 29 other bots.

Other ai search: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, DuckAssistBot, Amazonbot.

Build a complete file with the robots.txt generator.