YandexBot

Vendor: Yandex
Type: Search
JavaScript rendering: partial
Honors robots.txt: yes


Vendor	Yandex
Type	Traditional search crawler (Russia, CIS)
robots.txt token	`Yandex` (umbrella) and `YandexBot` (specific)
JavaScript rendering	Partial — limited JS support, full SSR strongly recommended
Honors robots.txt	Yes; also supports `Clean-param:` and `Host:` directives
Vendor docs	yandex.com/support/webmaster/robot-workings/robot.html

User-Agent strings

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

Mobile:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B411 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; YandexMobileBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)

Many variants exist: YandexImages, YandexVideo, YandexMedia, YandexNews, YandexCalendar, etc.

Purpose

The crawler behind Yandex Search, the dominant search engine in Russia and several CIS countries. Also crawls for Yandex Market (ecommerce), Yandex News, and other Yandex products.

Network identity

Hostname pattern: .yandex.ru, .yandex.net, *.yandex.com
Verification via reverse-DNS to those hosts.

In our audit

In v2, yandex.ru itself was tested — interesting feedback loop. The site blocks ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot but serves Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot and ChatGPT-User normally. Indicates Yandex has selected which foreign AI bots it considers acceptable.

How to allow / block

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /private/

# Yandex-specific Clean-param directive (collapses URL variants)
User-agent: Yandex
Clean-param: utm_source&utm_medium /catalog/

Quirks

Honors Crawl-delay: and the Yandex-specific Clean-param: and

Host: directives.

JS rendering is more limited than Google or Bing — sites that

depend heavily on client-side rendering may have indexing gaps.

Two umbrella tokens: Yandex covers all Yandex bots; YandexBot

is the main search crawler specifically.

Bot reference catalog