Overview
Qwantbot is operated by Qwant and is used for Crawling pages for Qwant's web search index.
Its documented identity is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot/1.0_12345; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/). The robots.txt token is Qwantbot.
It follows robots.txt rules addressed to Qwantbot.
Verify Qwantbot with reverse DNS ending in qwant.com and a forward lookup returning the original IP. Qwant also publishes a current JSON network file.
Identity
- User-Agent Pattern
-
Qwantbot - Aliases
- Qwantbot/; Qwant web crawler
- HTTP Agent Examples
-
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot/1.0_12345; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/) - Robots Token
- Qwantbot
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Verify Qwantbot with reverse DNS ending in qwant.com and a forward lookup returning the original IP. Qwant also publishes a current JSON network file.
Classification
- Type
- Search
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Qwant
- Operator
- Qwant
- Company
- Qwant SAS
- Purpose
- Search indexing
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Crawling pages for Qwant's web search index.
- Detection Notes
- Match the Qwantbot token rather than one fixed version or worker ID. Qwant's documented pattern allows version and worker identifiers to change and optionally includes the -news suffix.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- The token is spoofable; use forward-confirmed DNS or Qwant's current JSON network list.
- Risk
- Safe
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
-
User-agent: Qwantbot Disallow: / - Apache Rule
-
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Qwantbot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L] - Nginx Rule
-
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Qwantbot") { return 403; }