In short. YandexBot crawls pages for Yandex Search, with identity verified through matching reverse and forward DNS lookups.

Definition: YandexBot is Yandex's main indexing robot, a system that crawls website pages and loads them into its search database. As of 17 October 2026, Yandex documents its identity, access rules and verification procedure in Yandex Webmaster.

Key facts

Yandex's robot documentation identifies YandexBot as the main indexing robot and lists separate robots for images and videos.
The User-agent documentation allows a specific YandexBot group in robots.txt, the file containing crawler access directives.
Yandex's site submission guidance lists Sitemap files and the IndexNow protocol as ways to report page changes.
The Page check tool shows the response code and page content received by a selected bot.

How is YandexBot identified and verified?

A user-agent is the identifier a client sends with a request. Yandex's verification documentation gives this YandexBot string:

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

The same documentation warns that other robots can imitate this identifier. Verification starts with the request's IP address in server logs. A reverse DNS lookup, which finds a hostname from an IP address, must return a name ending in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com. A forward DNS lookup of that hostname must then return the original IP address.

Yandex also provides an IP address check tool for indexing bots. It recommends reverse DNS filtering over maintaining IP address lists because the method is more resistant to changes in its internal networks. Logs can include a browser version alongside the robot identifier; Yandex recommends searching without that version because it can change.

Which robots.txt rules apply?

Yandex's User-agent directive guide gives a crawler-specific example. Its main indexing robot group can be written as:

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /*id=

The example applies Disallow: /*id= to the main indexing robot. In the guide's example, the YandexBot group takes precedence for the main indexing robot over groups for Yandex and *. A separate User-agent: Yandex group also causes the indexing bot to ignore the general User-agent: * group.

Rules must account for the particular robot involved. Yandex's robot table marks YandexBot as following general robots.txt rules, while some other Yandex robots can ignore general restrictions. The table identifies YandexImages as the image indexing robot and YandexVideo as a video indexing robot.

How are crawling and page access checked?

Yandex's site submission instructions explain that a Sitemap file supplies site URLs for processing during a subsequent crawl. In Yandex Webmaster, Indexing > Reindex pages signals the indexing bot to visit selected new or changed pages. IndexNow reports updated, new and deleted pages automatically.

The Page check documentation describes selecting a page URL, device type and bot. The selected bot's user-agent appears below the field. The tool reports the response code, the content visible to the bot and whether the page is included in or excluded from search. These checks help diagnose page access separately from identifying a request in server logs.

FAQ

Is a YandexBot user-agent sufficient to verify a request?

Yandex's verification procedure requires you to check the request IP with reverse DNS and then confirm that forward DNS returns the same IP. The user-agent alone can be imitated.

How can I request another crawl of an updated page?

You can submit the URL through Indexing > Reindex pages in Yandex Webmaster. Yandex's submission guidance describes this as a signal for the indexing bot to visit the page.

Can I inspect what a Yandex bot receives?

You can use Yandex Webmaster's Page check tool to select a bot and inspect the response code and page content it receives.

Sources

Check how a page reads to answer engines. Open the GEO score analyzer