What is YiyanBot?
YiyanBot is a web crawler operated by Baidu that fetches web content for the yiyan.baidu.com assistant and related ERNIE-generated answers. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Baidu |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 7, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
YiyanBot fetches one page at a time, the moment someone asks a question it can answer, so it never crawls your site. How much you see depends on how many people use YiyanBot and how often they ask about what your site covers. A popular assistant can hit you steadily, while a single user or a niche one stays quiet between occasional spikes.
How To Block YiyanBot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block YiyanBot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI assistants at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: YiyanBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/yiyanbot
Disallow: /YiyanBot Global Insights
As of July 7, 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 YiyanBot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Assistant Traffic
1.2% of all web traffic came from AI assistants.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block YiyanBot?
Probably not. YiyanBot fetches a page when someone asks a question it can answer, and the response cites and links to your site. Blocking it removes you from those answers without improving your Google rankings, because assistants play no part in traditional search indexing. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for YiyanBot right now.
Does YiyanBot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. YiyanBot is expected to honor 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 YiyanBot actually honors it.
Does YiyanBot Access Private Content?
It has no way in. YiyanBot fetches pages the way an anonymous visitor loads a URL, with no stored logins. Anything behind a paywall or a login stays out of its reach.
Why Is YiyanBot Visiting My Website?
Someone asked Baidu's assistant a question your page can help answer. YiyanBot retrieved the page in that moment to ground the answer, usually with a citation linking back to you.
How Can I Tell if YiyanBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks YiyanBot 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 "YiyanBot". Look for fetches of individual pages that do not follow a crawl pattern. Keep in mind that YiyanBot 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.