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.
What this means
YandexBot is the primary crawler for Yandex, a search engine widely used for Russian-language search. If your audience includes Russian-speaking users, YandexBot crawling reflects Yandex discovering and indexing your pages.
Yandex documents several specialised crawler tokens; YandexBot is the main one for general web crawling.
How to verify YandexBot
Yandex documents a reverse-DNS verification method: a genuine YandexBot IP should resolve into a Yandex domain (such as yandex.ru, yandex.net, or yandex.com), confirmed by a forward lookup back to the same IP. Verify rather than trusting the user agent, which is spoofable.
- robots.txt token: YandexBot
- Verify via reverse DNS into a Yandex domain
- Confirm with a matching forward DNS lookup
How it appears in analytics and logs
A request carrying the YandexBot token is Yandex's crawler fetching a URL — a bot event. Yandex matters most for Russian-language audiences; steady crawling is the healthy state for sites targeting that market.
Diagnostic use case
Confirm Yandex is crawling your site and verify suspect YandexBot requests via reverse DNS to Yandex domains.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies YandexBot server-side as a search crawler and shows its activity separately from human traffic, so Yandex crawl coverage is visible without log parsing.
Common mistakes
- Trusting a YandexBot user agent without reverse-DNS verification.
- Ignoring Yandex when targeting Russian-language audiences.
- Counting crawler hits as human visits.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Identification uses the user agent plus reverse-DNS verification — no human identity. WebmasterID records YandexBot as a bot event, separate from human analytics.
Related pages
- Baiduspider — Baidu's web crawler
Baiduspider is the main crawler for Baidu, a leading search engine for Chinese-language search. It uses the Baiduspider robots.txt token. Baidu's documentation is primarily in Chinese and verification options are more limited than Google's, so treat verification with care.
- DuckDuckBot — DuckDuckGo's crawler
DuckDuckBot is the crawler operated by DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo also draws on third-party indexes for some results, so DuckDuckBot is one part of how its results are built. DuckDuckGo documents the crawler and publishes IP addresses operators can use to verify it.
- Bot intelligence
See search-engine crawlers separated from human traffic.
Sources and verification notes
- Yandex — robots and crawler verification documentationDocuments YandexBot and reverse-DNS verification into Yandex domains.
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.