Crawls for Yandex Search and its Alice assistant answers. It is operated by Yandex.

Does YandexBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Yandex states that YandexBot honours robots.txt directives, so a Disallow rule for the YandexBot token is sufficient.

YandexBot

YandexHonours robots.txt

Crawls for Yandex Search and its Alice assistant answers. Relevant in Russian-language markets only.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)

How to verify it

Reverse DNS to yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com.

What blocking costs

Relevant in Russian-language markets only.

# Block YandexBot
User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

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

Robots.txt is enough

Yandex documents YandexBot 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.