🤖 Overview

Kimi-SearchBot is a web crawler operated by Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi AI assistant and Kimi Search. Its documented role is to discover and fetch publicly accessible pages that can be used as retrieval sources for Kimi's search-augmented answers, rather than for training foundation models. Moonshot AI publishes crawler information through its official Kimi and Moonshot AI platform properties, including https://kimi.moonshot.cn and https://platform.moonshot.cn.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Kimi-SearchBot issues HTTP GET requests for HTML, PDF, and other text-bearing resources, following hyperlinks and sitemaps to build a fresh retrieval index. It typically sends a descriptive User-Agent and accepts standard compression and caching headers; crawl bursts are shorter than archive crawlers, with recrawl intervals driven by content change signals such as Last-Modified and ETag. Moonshot AI does not publicly enumerate a fixed IP range in the same way as some search engines, so operators should validate by forward-confirmed reverse DNS or by published JSON ranges where available. The bot uses IPv4 and IPv6 and does not attempt authentication, form submission, or non-public endpoint access.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Kimi-SearchBot is designed to honor robots.txt directives as described in RFC 9309, including Disallow, Allow, and Crawl-delay semantics where supported. Site owners can block it with a user-agent token of Kimi-SearchBot; Moonshot AI's crawler documentation states that access restrictions are respected for supported directives. Because robots.txt is advisory, operators often supplement it with firewall rules and rate limits.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary fingerprint is the User-Agent string containing Kimi-SearchBot, commonly formatted as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Kimi-SearchBot/1.0; +https://kimi.moonshot.cn/bot) or a similar versioned token. Requests may include standard Accept, Accept-Encoding, and Connection headers but generally lack browser-only headers such as Sec-Fetch-Site or cookies. Reverse DNS and published crawler documentation are the recommended verification methods.

📊 Data Usage

Collected content feeds Kimi's web search and retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, enabling citations and up-to-date answers in the Kimi assistant. Moonshot AI states that search crawler data is used for search indexing and answer grounding, not for resale as a standalone web index. Public CVE databases list no vulnerability assigned specifically to Kimi-SearchBot.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is appropriate because unthrottled retrieval crawling can consume origin bandwidth and database connections even when requests are legitimate. Threshold-based blocking should therefore distinguish verified Kimi-SearchBot traffic from impersonators, applying generous but bounded limits per IP and per host.

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