Mail.ru search crawler — Mail.RU_Bot
Mail.ru is a major Russian internet portal and search provider, and it operates its own crawler to index the web for its search results. The crawler self-identifies with a Mail.RU_Bot token. It is a genuine regional search-engine indexer, so allowing it can help your pages appear in Mail.ru search.
What this means
Mail.ru is one of the largest Russian internet portals, offering email, news, and search. Its search crawler fetches public pages to build the index behind Mail.ru search results. Allowing it helps your pages appear in that index, which matters for sites targeting Russian-speaking audiences.
Mail.ru sits alongside Yandex as a regional engine for the Russian market; if Russia is not a target market, its crawl is simply bot traffic to account for, not audience.
How the Mail.ru crawler identifies itself
The crawler self-identifies with a Mail.RU token; the historically documented user-agent token is Mail.RU_Bot, and the string includes a self-identifying Mail.ru URL. Because Mail.ru's crawler is less exhaustively documented in English than Googlebot or Bingbot, this entry is marked partially verified — match on the Mail.RU_Bot token but corroborate with current Mail.ru webmaster documentation before treating it as authoritative.
As with any crawler, the user agent is a claim that can be copied; verify where authenticity matters.
- robots.txt token: Mail.RU_Bot (Mail.ru's documented crawler token)
- User agent includes a self-identifying Mail.ru URL
- A regional search-engine indexer for the Russian market
robots.txt considerations
Mail.ru's crawler is expected to honour robots.txt like other search engines. To disallow it site-wide you would target its token:
User-agent: Mail.RU_Bot Disallow: /
Blocking it removes your pages from Mail.ru's index, which is usually undesirable if you target Russian users. robots.txt is a request honoured by compliant crawlers, not an access-control mechanism.
How it appears in analytics and logs
A request carrying the Mail.RU_Bot token is Mail.ru's search crawler fetching a URL for its index — a bot event, not a human visit. Because it is a search-engine indexer, blocking it can remove your pages from Mail.ru search results.
Diagnostic use case
Confirm Mail.ru's crawler is indexing your site for Russian search, keep it allowed for that market, and distinguish it from SEO tool crawlers.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies Mail.ru's crawler server-side as a search bot and shows its activity on the bot-intelligence surface, separate from human analytics, so you can see Russian search-engine crawl coverage without log parsing.
Common mistakes
- Blocking Mail.RU_Bot and dropping out of Russian-market search via Mail.ru.
- Confusing the Mail.ru search crawler with YandexBot — they are separate engines.
- Assuming a fixed token without checking Mail.ru's current webmaster docs.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Mail.ru crawler detection uses only the request user-agent. No human identity is involved. WebmasterID records the crawl as a bot event, separate from human analytics, and never attaches it to a visitor profile.
Related pages
- YandexBot — Yandex's web crawler
YandexBot is the main crawler for Yandex, a search engine with a strong presence in Russian-language search. It uses the YandexBot robots.txt token and can be verified through reverse DNS, where the IP should resolve into a Yandex domain, confirmed by a matching forward lookup.
- Regional search engines overview
In several markets a regional search engine leads instead of Google: Yandex in Russian-language search, Baidu in China, Naver in South Korea, Seznam in the Czech Republic, and Coc Coc in Vietnam. Recognising their crawlers matters because being indexed by them is how you reach those audiences.
- Qwant search crawler — Qwantify
Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine based in France that operates its own crawler to index the web for European search results. Its crawler self-identifies with a Qwant token (historically Qwantify). It is a genuine search-engine indexer, so allowing it can help your pages appear in Qwant results.
- Web crawlers overview
How WebmasterID separates regional search bots from SEO and AI crawlers.
Sources and verification notes
- Mail.ru — webmaster / search helpMail.ru operates its own search crawler; the Mail.RU_Bot token is documented historically. Verify current token before relying on it.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.