YouBot: You.com's search crawler
YouBot is the crawler behind You.com's search engine, which indexes pages for its answers.
Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.
At a glance
YouBot in one table
- Company
- You.com
- What it's for
- Search index: read into the index an ai assistant searches.
- robots.txt token
YouBot- Full user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; YouBot/1.0; +https://docs.you.com/youbot; env:prod) Chrome/X.X.X.X Safari/537.36- Follows robots.txt
- Follows it. You.com says YouBot respects robots.txt, crawl-delay included, and rereads the file every 30 minutes.
- How to verify
- Look up the visitor's IP: the hostname should end in search.you.com, and that hostname should resolve back to the same IP.
- Source
- You.com's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
robots.txt
Allow YouBot
Allow it. It builds the index You.com's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
User-agent: YouBotAllow: /Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether YouBot reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Related
Other search index bots
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From You.com's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
YouBot is the crawler behind You.com's search engine, which indexes pages for its answers.
You.com says YouBot respects robots.txt, crawl-delay included, and rereads the file every 30 minutes.
Look up the visitor's IP: the hostname should end in search.you.com, and that hostname should resolve back to the same IP.
Allow it. It builds the index You.com's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
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