What is yacybot?
yacybot is the web crawler for YaCy, a decentralized peer-to-peer search engine that operates without central servers. The bot indexes content for the YaCy network, enabling distributed web search across participating computers in this open-source project. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | YaCy |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 31, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
yacybot crawls on a schedule set by algorithms, not a calendar. Expect visit frequency to track your site's popularity, how often your content changes, and your domain authority. It throttles itself to avoid loading your server and follows crawl rules better than almost any other category of bot.
yacybot's User Agent
| User Agent | yacybot (freeworld/global; amd64 Linux 6.12.95+deb13-amd64; java 21.0.11; Etc/en) https://yacy.net/bot.html |
How To Block yacybot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block yacybot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all search engine crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: yacybot # https://knownagents.com/agents/yacybot
Disallow: /Global Insights for yacybot
As of July 31, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
0% of top websites block yacybot in their robots.txt files.
Overall Search Engine Crawler Traffic
12.7% of all web traffic came from search engine crawlers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by yacybot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block yacybot?
No, unless you want your pages out of search results. yacybot feeds a search engine index, and blocking it erases your visibility and organic traffic from that engine. This is the one category almost every website should allow. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for yacybot right now.
Does yacybot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. yacybot is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms yacybot actually follows it.
Does yacybot Access Private Content?
No. yacybot indexes public pages only and does not sign in anywhere. Watch for accidentally public content though, because anything reachable without a login can end up in search results.
Why Is yacybot Visiting My Website?
yacybot is keeping its search index current. Links, sitemaps, or direct submission brought it to your site, and it comes back at a rate tuned to how often your content changes and how popular your site is.
How Can I Tell if yacybot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks yacybot visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "yacybot". Look for steady recurring visits spread across your site. Keep in mind that yacybot doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.