YandexBot

Safe Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: Yes

Yandex's main indexing robot for search.

Key facts

Operator: Yandex
Family: Yandex
Purpose: Indexing
User-Agent: YandexBot
Should you block it?: Depends
Verified: Yes
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Identity type: Official Documented
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: YandexBot
robots.txt token: YandexBot
HTTP user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)
Aliases: http://yandex.com/bots; Yandex main crawler

Ownership

Operator: Yandex
Family: Yandex
Type: Search
Purpose: Indexing

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Verification: Verify with reverse DNS and forward DNS checks; valid Yandex hosts end in yandex.ru, yandex.net, or yandex.com.
Operator URL: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/robot-workings/check-yandex-robots
Source URL: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/robot-workings/check-yandex-robots

Blocking and detection

Robots

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "YandexBot")

Advanced server rules

Apache

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

Nginx

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

Notes

YandexBot is Yandex’s main indexing robot. Yandex documents its user agent and says it takes general robots.txt rules into account. Yandex recommends reverse and forward DNS checks to verify authenticity.

Evidence and source

Verify with reverse DNS and forward DNS checks; valid Yandex hosts end in yandex.ru, yandex.net, or yandex.com.

https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/en/robot-workings/check-yandex-robots