YouBot
Retrieves data for You.com's search engine and its language models.
Where this comes from
- Documented by the vendor. Source: about.you.com
- Honours robots.txt.
- Counted in the readiness score. It can keep a site out of AI search or answers, so a block costs points.
In the top 1,000 websites
- 14.4% block it in robots.txt (82 of the 569 sites with a robots.txt), as of 2026-10-12.
- Method, limits and the full data: the October 2026 study of the top 1,000 websites.
What blocking it costs
Your pages leave the search index YouBot builds, so You.com's product can no longer find or cite them from its own index. The score counts it among the crawlers that feed AI search and answers, so a block costs points.
The robots.txt lines
To let it in (a group that names the crawler replaces any wildcard rules for it, so this also lifts a User-agent: * block):
User-agent: YouBot
Allow: /To keep it out:
User-agent: YouBot
Disallow: /A rule in robots.txt is a request. You.com says this crawler honours it. The robots.txt generator writes a whole file with the same split: block the training crawlers, keep the search and answer crawlers.
Does YouBot get through on your site?
Run the free check: it reads your robots.txt against all 51 crawlers and tells you which ones can read you, and what to change.