Baiduspider
| Vendor | Baidu |
| Type | Traditional search crawler (China) |
| robots.txt token | Baiduspider |
| JavaScript rendering | Minimal — SSR / dynamic rendering strongly recommended |
| Honors robots.txt | Yes |
| Vendor docs | help.baidu.com/question?prod_id=99&class=476&id=3001 |
User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)Mobile variant:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux;u;Android 4.2.2;zh-cn;) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML,like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile Safari/10600.6.3 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)Sibling spiders: Baiduspider-image, Baiduspider-video, Baiduspider-news, Baiduspider-favo.
Purpose
The crawler behind Baidu Search, China's dominant search engine. Also feeds Baidu's ecommerce verticals and content products.
In our audit
baidu.com itself was tested in v1 (top-30 general). Critically, baidu serves a fully pre-rendered ~250 KB HTML to Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot — while Chrome receives a 357-character shell. The most extreme dynamic-rendering ratio (700×) we measured.
This is the technique Baidu is most famous for technically: Baidu's Spider has notably weaker JS-rendering than Google or Bing, so a long tail of Chinese sites pre-render specifically for it. That same infrastructure now serves AI crawlers too.
How to allow / block
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /private/
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /images/private/Quirks
- The Baiduspider documentation explicitly recommends dynamic
rendering or SSR — this is the only major search vendor that still has it in its docs.
- IP ranges are not as publicly enumerable as Google's; reverse-DNS
to *.baidu.com is the standard verification.