What is Sogou web spider?

Crawls for Sogou search and Tencent-adjacent AI features. It is operated by Tencent / Sogou.

Does Sogou web spider respect robots.txt?

Yes. Tencent / Sogou states that Sogou web spider honours robots.txt directives, so a Disallow rule for the Sogou web spider token is sufficient.

Tencent / SogouHonours robots.txt

Crawls for Sogou search and Tencent-adjacent AI features. Secondary Chinese surface with WeChat-ecosystem reach.

Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)

How to verify it

Reverse DNS to sogou.com.

What blocking costs

Secondary Chinese surface with WeChat-ecosystem reach.

# Block Sogou web spider
User-agent: Sogou web spider
Disallow: /

# Allow everything else
User-agent: *
Allow: /

Robots.txt is enough

Tencent / Sogou documents Sogou web spider as honouring robots.txt. Verify with your logs after deploying — a spoofed agent will keep coming.

Generate a full robots.txt

Pick which AI crawlers to allow or block across all 42 agents and copy the file out.