AI search index · You.com
YouBot
Builds You.com's own search index, which powers its answer engine and web search APIs.
- Operator
- You.com
- Purpose
- AI search index
- Used for
- You.com search and APIs
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes
- robots.txt token
YouBot- User-agent string
- Not published by the operator
- IP list
- Not published
- Official docs
- about.you.com
- Feeds
- You.com
Block YouBot in robots.txt
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /Blocking a search or user-triggered bot removes your pages from that assistant's answers. To opt out of model training only, block the operator's training crawler instead.
Well-known sites that block YouBot
amazon.com #30, yahoo.com #72, amazonvideo.com #85, msn.com #92, snapchat.com #157, tumblr.com #160, nytimes.com #163, cnn.com #195, theguardian.com #196, bbc.com #216, sciencedirect.com #224, bbc.co.uk #236, weather.com #250, launchpad.net #281, nature.com #297, amazon.co.uk #326, trustpilot.com #344, bloomberg.com #386, amazon.de #387, aol.com #421, amazon.co.jp #490, uol.com.br #535, wired.com #570, tripadvisor.com #572
Questions
What is YouBot?
YouBot is a ai search index bot operated by You.com, used for You.com search and APIs. Builds You.com's own search index, which powers its answer engine and web search APIs.
How do I block YouBot?
Add "User-agent: YouBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.
Does YouBot respect robots.txt?
Yes. You.com documents that YouBot honours robots.txt directives.
How many websites block YouBot?
In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 10.3% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed YouBot.
Analysis using this data
- Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
- The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.
How to cite this data
This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:
- Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
- Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
- Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
- Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
- Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.
In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's YouBot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.
Paul, K. (2026). YouBot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot
Paul, Kuldeep. "YouBot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot.
Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "YouBot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot.
@misc{paul2026youbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {YouBot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }
<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/youbot">YouBot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)