🤖 Overview

ybot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Yahoo! Inc. (now part of Verizon Media / Apollo Global Management via Yahoo) that indexes web content for use in Yahoo Search and related services. First documented in early 2000s, ybot is a core component of Yahoo’s search engine infrastructure, responsible for discovering and refreshing URLs in the Yahoo index. According to Yahoo’s official crawler documentation (help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2413), ybot operates under the same guidelines as other major search engine bots and feeds data into Yahoo Search results and Yahoo’s content aggregation platforms.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ybot performs standard HTTP/1.1 GET requests and supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Its crawl frequency is moderate compared to Googlebot, typically visiting sites every few days to weeks depending on site authority and update frequency. Yahoo publishes a list of IP ranges on its official “Yahoo Crawler IP Addresses” page at help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2413, which includes Class A ranges such as 72.30.0.0/16, 98.136.0.0/14, and 67.195.0.0/16. ybot may also use additional subnets from Verizon Media’s IP allocations. Crawl depth respects standard link depth levels, and it follows rel="nofollow" attributes. Historically, ybot has been known to send requests from multiple IPs per session, rotating between addresses to distribute load. It respects standard HTTP status codes (e.g., 301, 404) and does not crawl URLs that return 410 Gone or 403 Forbidden responses.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Yahoo’s official resources, ybot fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow and Allow rules. Multiple independent tests (e.g., from webmaster forums and SEO communities) confirm that ybot stops crawling disallowed paths within 24 hours of a robots.txt change. Yahoo explicitly recommends using User-agent: YahooSeeker or User-agent: ybot in robots.txt to control its behavior. The crawler also respects Crawl-Delay directives if included in robots.txt, as noted in Yahoo’s webmaster guidelines.

🔍 Detection Indicators

ybot identifies itself with the User-Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp) but also uses a shorter variant: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ybot; +https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2413). According to published logs, it often includes From: [email protected] or From: [email protected] in email header fields (rarely used in HTTP headers today). Another fingerprint is the consistent use of YahooSeeker in the User-Agent. IP reverse lookups for ybot requests typically resolve to hosts like ybtp.verizonmedia.net or ybts.verizonmedia.net.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data from ybot is primarily used to populate the Yahoo Search index, enabling users to find web pages through Yahoo’s search engine. Additionally, the data may be incorporated into Yahoo’s content recommendation algorithms, news aggregation (Yahoo News), and vertical search products (e.g., Yahoo Images, Yahoo Video). Yahoo claims that indexed content is not used for AI training models, and no machine learning training datasets are derived from crawled pages, according to their privacy policy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

ybot is rate-limited because its request frequency can overwhelm smaller web servers — typical crawl rates of 1 request per 2–5 seconds per IP. Security teams implement per-IP thresholds (e.g., 10 requests per second) or rate-limiting via WAF rules referencing the User-Agent to prevent excessive load while allowing legitimate indexing. Yahoo provides no guarantee of limiting crawl burst rates, so individual site owners must enforce their own thresholds to maintain server performance.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.