Huawei

Common mistakes with Huawei's crawlers

The errors we see most often with Huawei's crawlers in the files and firewalls we test:

1. Assuming that blocking Huawei's crawlers removes you from AI answers. It is a training crawler; AI answers are fed by retrieval and user-triggered crawlers with different tokens.
2. Blocking Huawei's crawlers with a broad User-agent: * rule that also catches search engines. Name PanguBot in its own group instead.
3. Expecting a Huawei's crawlers block to remove content already collected. robots.txt only affects future visits.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check Huawei's crawlers from outside after every change.

Spotting Huawei in your logs

robots.txt says what Huawei PanguBot and PetalBot may do; your access logs show what they actually did.

Count requests

On a server with standard Nginx or Apache logs, this counts matching requests per day (adjust the log path for your host):

grep -iE "PanguBot|PetalBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c

And this shows which paths it requested most, which is the quickest way to see whether your Disallow lines are being respected:

grep -iE "PanguBot|PetalBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

Check the requests are genuine

Anyone can send these user-agents, so confirm the source before acting on a match:

• PanguBot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where Huawei documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable Huawei PanguBot request with caution. Check it separately from PetalBot.
• PetalBot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where Huawei documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable PetalBot request with caution. Check it separately from Huawei PanguBot.

What our own data shows about Huawei

Everything below comes from the AI Crawler Check bot database and our two most recent robots.txt scans of the Tranco top 10,000, not from Huawei's marketing. It covers 2 Huawei tokens in turn.

PanguBot in our records

We first recorded PanguBot on March 17, 2026. We could not find a page where Huawei names it, so treat the token as reported rather than documented. PanguBot is outside our tracked token set, but 192 of 5,583 top-site files already name it, which is enough to show owners treat it as a real crawler.

Among the 104 AI and LLM crawlers in our database, PanguBot sits 73th by priority (Tier 2), level with AddSearchBot, AI2Bot, AI2Bot-DeepResearchEval, aiHitBot. 81 of the 104 share its safe rating. Other operators with a crawler that collects pages to train AI models: ClaudeBot (Anthropic, Tier 1), Google-Extended (Google, Tier 1), GPTBot (OpenAI, Tier 1), Meta-ExternalAgent (Meta, Tier 1), AI2Bot (Allen Institute for AI, Tier 2). A policy for PanguBot is usually a policy for these too.

A decision record for PanguBot

Teams that review crawlers once a quarter keep one short entry per token, so anyone can see why a rule exists and when it was last checked. Filled in from our data, the PanguBot entry reads:

• Operator and job: Huawei; it collects pages to train AI models.
• Priority and behaviour: Tier 2, rated safe, blocking impact low.
• Suggested starting point: Your licensing call: Disallow to refuse training, Allow to permit it.
• Enforcement: PanguBot's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the PanguBot rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

User-agent: PanguBot
Allow: /

Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the PanguBot entry whenever Huawei announces a change, because a Tier 2 crawler affects visibility directly.

PetalBot in our records

We first recorded PetalBot on March 17, 2026. Huawei documents it on webmaster.petalsearch.com, and we recheck that page before each release. No file in our top-10,000 scans names PetalBot, so any rule you write for it puts you ahead of almost every large site.

Among the 63 search engines in our database, PetalBot sits 23th by priority (Tier 3), level with AdIdxBot, Amzn-SearchBot, Applebot, baidu. 62 of the 63 share its safe rating. Other operators with a crawler that builds a search or answer index: AddSearchBot (AddSearch, Tier 2), AIWebIndex (Lyrenth, Tier 2), atlassian-bot (Atlassian, Tier 2), AzureAI-SearchBot (Microsoft, Tier 2), Cloudflare-AI-Search (Cloudflare, Tier 2). A policy for PetalBot is usually a policy for these too.

A decision record for PetalBot

Teams that review crawlers once a quarter keep one short entry per token, so anyone can see why a rule exists and when it was last checked. Filled in from our data, the PetalBot entry reads:

• Operator and job: Huawei; it builds a search or answer index.
• Priority and behaviour: Tier 3, rated safe, blocking impact critical.
• Suggested starting point: Allow by default; revisit if it costs you bandwidth.
• Enforcement: PetalBot's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the PetalBot rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /

Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the PetalBot entry once a quarter, or when Huawei publishes a new token next to it.

How top sites treat Huawei's crawlers

From our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 (5,583 valid files, fetched October 20, 2026):

None of the tokens for Huawei's crawlers is tracked by name in our study. For scale, 20.1% of top-site files block at least one AI training crawler and 4.3% refuse every unnamed crawler with User-agent: * and Disallow: /, which would catch Huawei's crawlers too.

More questions about Huawei

Will blocking Huawei affect my Google rankings?

Only if one of its tokens is a Google search crawler. None of Huawei's tokens are Googlebot, so classic Google rankings are unaffected.

How quickly does a robots.txt change take effect for Huawei?

Crawlers cache robots.txt, commonly for up to a day. Expect a change to apply within about 24 hours, and confirm it in your logs.

Can I allow Huawei on some sections and block it on others?

Yes. Inside the group for PanguBot, add Disallow lines for the paths to keep private and Allow lines for exceptions. The longest matching rule wins.

Does blocking Huawei delete content it already collected?

No. robots.txt only controls future visits. For content already collected, check whether Huawei offers a removal or opt-out process.

Is a firewall block better than robots.txt for Huawei?

A firewall enforces the decision, while robots.txt asks politely. Many operators recommend robots.txt because blocking their IPs can stop them reading your rules at all. Use robots.txt first, and add a firewall rule only if requests continue.