YouBot

The crawler behind the You.com search engine. It indexes pages for You.com's AI search and follows robots.txt.

What happens if you block it

Your pages drop out of You.com's index and its AI search answers.

Our take

Allow it if you want to appear in You.com search.

robots.txt

To block it:

User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /

To allow it explicitly (useful when a wider rule blocks other bots):

User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /

The operator's own words

YouBot is the web crawler that powers the You.com search engine. ... It respects robots.txt directives and crawl rate preferences.You.com documentation, checked 2026-11-04

robots.txt allows it, but is it really getting through?

A firewall or CDN rule can reject YouBot even when robots.txt welcomes it, and nothing in your CMS shows it. Our check sends a live request as YouBot alongside a normal browser and a Googlebot control, so a bot-verification rule isn't mistaken for a block.