yacybot

Neutral Block: Depends robots.txt: Yes

yacybot is the user-agent of YaCy web crawlers in the peer-to-peer YaCy web search project.

Key facts

Operator: YaCy
Family: YaCy
Purpose: Search
User-Agent: yacybot
Should you block it?: Depends
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Identity type: Official Documented
Confidence: Medium
Last verified: 2026-04-01

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: yacybot
robots.txt token: yacybot
HTTP user-agent: yacybot
Aliases: YaCy-Bot

Ownership

Operator: YaCy
Family: YaCy
Type: Search
Purpose: Search

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: Medium
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Verification: Official YaCy bot documentation; verify by user-agent and behavior, but note that crawlers are run by YaCy users rather than a single central service.
Operator URL: https://yacy.net/bot.html
Source URL: https://yacy.net/bot.html

Blocking and detection

Robots

User-agent: yacybot
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "yacybot")

Advanced server rules

Apache

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} yacybot [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "yacybot") { return 403; }

Notes

The YaCy project says yacybot is the user-agent of YaCy web crawlers maintained by YaCy users. The project says YaCy follows robots.txt instructions and can be controlled the standard way, but deployments are distributed and not centrally operated by a single crawler service.

Evidence and source

Official YaCy bot documentation; verify by user-agent and behavior, but note that crawlers are run by YaCy users rather than a single central service.

https://yacy.net/bot.html

Key facts

Bot details

Identity

Ownership

Verification and trust

Blocking and detection

Robots

Cloudflare

Apache

Nginx

Notes

Evidence and source

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