Overview
Qwantbot-news is operated by Qwant and is used for Crawling news content for Qwant search services.
Its documented identity is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot-news/2.0; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/). The robots.txt token is Qwantbot.
It follows robots.txt rules addressed to Qwantbot.
Verify Qwantbot-news with reverse DNS ending in qwant.com and a forward lookup returning the original IP, or use Qwant's current JSON network file.
Identity
- User-Agent Pattern
-
Qwantbot-news - Aliases
- Qwantbot-news/; Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot-news/2.0; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/)
- HTTP Agent Examples
-
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot-news/2.0; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/) - Robots Token
- Qwantbot
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Verify Qwantbot-news with reverse DNS ending in qwant.com and a forward lookup returning the original IP, or use Qwant's current JSON network file.
Classification
- Type
- Search
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Qwant
- Operator
- Qwant
- Company
- Qwant SAS
- Purpose
- News indexing
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Crawling news content for Qwant search services.
- Detection Notes
- Match the Qwantbot-news suffix within Qwant's documented variable user-agent pattern. Use the shared Qwantbot robots token and verify origin separately.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- The user-agent can be copied; require Qwant-controlled DNS or current network evidence.
- Risk
- Safe
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
-
User-agent: Qwantbot Disallow: / - Apache Rule
-
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Qwantbot\-news [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L] - Nginx Rule
-
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Qwantbot\-news") { return 403; }