YYouBot

What YouBot does

A search crawler reads your pages ahead of time and adds them to its operator's index. That index is what its search and assistant draw on to find pages and point people to them.

How to recognize it

YouBot names itself in its user agent with the token YouBot. That's what Ethogram matches, as a whole word in any case.

A user agent is only a claim, though: anyone can send YouBot. Scrapers borrow well-known names to get past rules meant for the real agent, so before you trust a visit, or block one, check where it came from.

How to tell it's really YouBot

You.com publishes no IP ranges, hostnames or signing keys for YouBot that Ethogram knows of, so there's nothing to check a visit against. Ethogram counts its visits as unverified: they may well be real, but the user agent is all there is.

Ethogram runs these checks on every request and gives each visit a verdict: verified, unverified or spoofed. Spoofed visits are counted apart and never added to YouBot's numbers. How verdicts work.

Allow or block YouBot in robots.txt

robots.txt groups its rules by user-agent token. To ask YouBot to stay off your whole site, add this group:

To let it read everything, name it with an allow rule. A group that names YouBot replaces the User-agent: * group for it, so it follows only these rules:

robots.txt is a request, not a lock: it's up to YouBot to read it and follow it. Ethogram reads your robots.txt every day and shows whether YouBot respects it, with the disallowed paths it asked for. To actually keep it out, use your firewall or bot protection, and check the visit's verdict first so you block impostors, not the real YouBot.

See what YouBot does on your site

Most analytics filter YouBot out as a bot. Ethogram records it on your server, where every request lands, with no script to load, and shows:

• Every visit from YouBot, with a verdict on whether it's really YouBot.
• Each visit step by step: the pages it read, what it searched for, and where it was blocked, looped or hit an error.
• Whether it respects your robots.txt, with the disallowed paths it asked for.
• How much of your bandwidth it takes, next to its share of requests.
• New versions of its user agent as they appear, and what changed in its behavior with each.
• A heads-up when its visits spike or stop, or when it starts getting blocked.