Ibou Search
SafeUser-agent: IbouBot
Category: Search Engines
SEO impact if blocked: 2/10
Ibou
1 crawler operated by Ibou
Who Ibou is, for site owners
Ibou operates 1 crawler in our directory, filed under Search Engines. Its crawl behaviour is rated safe.
Blocking Ibou carries an SEO impact score of 2/10. Blocking impact is rated: Low - No SEO ranking impact.
Our recommendation for Ibou: Generally safe to allow; provides legitimate crawling value.
Ibou at a glance
| Operator | Ibou |
|---|---|
| Crawler in directory | 1 |
| Categories | Search Engines |
| SEO impact if blocked | 2/10 |
| Crawl behaviour | 1 rated safe |
| Official crawler docs | Ibou crawler documentation |
Crawler operated by Ibou
What Ibou's crawlers are for
Ibou runs 1 crawler in our database. Grouped by the job each one does:
- a search engine crawler:
IbouBot
The highest-priority token is Tier 3. That makes Ibou a lower-priority operator for most sites: worth a deliberate decision, but rarely the one that decides your visibility.
How site owners treat Ibou
None of Ibou's tokens were among the names tracked in our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000, which usually means few large sites write rules for them yet. Your own logs are the best evidence of how often they visit.
Writing one policy for Ibou
A robots.txt file cannot say "Ibou"; it can only name Ibou's tokens, one group at a time. With a single token, one group is the whole policy.
# One token controls everything Ibou fetches through it
User-agent: IbouBot
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /- Decide per job, not per company. Training, search and user-triggered fetching have different trade-offs, even from the same operator.
- Name every token you mean. A token you leave out follows
User-agent: *. - Repeat shared rules. A named group ignores the
*group, so copy anyDisallowlines you still want it to obey. - Verify from outside. Run the AI crawlability test after any change to see the result for each Ibou token, including firewall refusals.
Test yourself: does User-agent: Ibou block all of Ibou's crawlers?
No. robots.txt matches crawler tokens, not company names. Use the token IbouBot.
Test yourself: if you block one Ibou token, are the others blocked too?
No. Each token is read separately. Blocking one leaves the rest following whatever group applies to them.
Each Ibou crawler, explained
A one-paragraph brief for every Ibou token in our database, covering what it does, how it treats robots.txt and how often large sites write rules for it:
- Ibou Search (
IbouBot, Tier 3): a search engine crawler that builds a search or answer index. Rated safe. Ibou Search's operator says it follows robots.txt, so a correctly written Ibou Search group is enough to control it. Not tracked in our robots.txt study.
Common mistakes with Ibou's crawlers
The errors we see most often with Ibou's crawlers in the files and firewalls we test:
- Blocking Ibou's crawlers to save bandwidth and then wondering why pages drop out of that search engine. Use crawl-rate settings or caching first.
- Writing a
User-agent: IbouBotgroup to add one rule for Ibou's crawlers and accidentally dropping every rule it used to follow underUser-agent: *. - Disallowing CSS and JavaScript folders, which can stop Ibou's crawlers rendering your pages properly.
All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check Ibou's crawlers from outside after every change.
What our own data shows about Ibou
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 Ibou's marketing. Ibou has one token in our database, so the whole picture fits in one place.
IbouBot in our records
We first recorded IbouBot on September 22, 2026. Ibou documents it on ibou.com, and we recheck that page before each release. No file in our top-10,000 scans names IbouBot, so any rule you write for it puts you ahead of almost every large site.
Among the 63 search engines in our database, IbouBot sits 18th 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 IbouBot is usually a policy for these too.
A decision record for IbouBot
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 IbouBot entry reads:
- Operator and job: Ibou; it builds a search or answer index.
- Priority and behaviour: Tier 3, rated safe, blocking impact not documented.
- Suggested starting point: Allow by default; revisit if it costs you bandwidth.
- Enforcement: IbouBot's operator says it follows robots.txt, so a correctly written IbouBot group is enough to control it.
User-agent: IbouBot
Allow: /Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the IbouBot entry once a quarter, or when Ibou publishes a new token next to it.
Checking IbouBot on your own site
Because Ibou runs only IbouBot in our records, one check covers the whole operator. Search your access logs for the string IbouBot over the last 30 days, note how many requests it made and which paths it asked for, then compare that with what your robots.txt allows. Match the requests against what Ibou publishes about the crawler, since that page is the only authority on its behaviour. A Tier 3 crawler rated safe rarely needs more than a quarterly look, and our log checker does the counting for you.
How top sites treat Ibou'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 Ibou'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 Ibou's crawlers too.
More questions about Ibou
- Will blocking Ibou affect my Google rankings?
- Only if one of its tokens is a Google search crawler. None of Ibou's tokens are Googlebot, so classic Google rankings are unaffected.
- How quickly does a robots.txt change take effect for Ibou?
- 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 Ibou on some sections and block it on others?
- Yes. Inside the group for
IbouBot, addDisallowlines for the paths to keep private andAllowlines for exceptions. The longest matching rule wins. - Does blocking Ibou delete content it already collected?
- No. robots.txt only controls future visits. For content already collected, check whether Ibou offers a removal or opt-out process.
- Is a firewall block better than robots.txt for Ibou?
- 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.
A five-minute Ibou review
- Confirm the token. Compare the user-agent in your logs with the tokens listed on this page. A close spelling is not the same crawler.
- Decide the outcome per crawler. Use the briefs above to choose allow, limit or block for each token.
- Write the group. Add or edit one
User-agentgroup per decision and repeat any shared rules inside it. - Publish and wait. Allow about a day for crawlers to fetch the new file.
- Confirm the result. Check your logs, then run the AI visibility checker to see the outcome from outside, including any firewall layer.
How to block or allow Ibou in robots.txt
This rule covers the single crawler Ibou operates. Add it to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain.
Block Ibou completely
User-agent: IbouBot
Disallow: /
Allow Ibou explicitly
User-agent: IbouBot
Allow: /
These Ibou rules ask; they do not enforce. If a Ibou token ignores them, block it at the server or CDN. Paths are case-sensitive, and each rule matches the token, not the full user-agent string.
Frequently asked questions about Ibou
What crawler does Ibou run?
Ibou operates 1 crawler in our directory: Ibou Search (user-agent IbouBot).
Should I block Ibou?
Generally safe to allow; provides legitimate crawling value. The SEO impact score for blocking is 2/10, where 10 means blocking costs you the most visibility.
How do I block Ibou in robots.txt?
Add the following to robots.txt at your domain root: User-agent: IbouBot then Disallow: /.
Does blocking Ibou hurt my search rankings?
Blocking impact is rated: Low - No SEO ranking impact. Google's own ranking crawler is Googlebot, which this operator does not run, so blocking Ibou does not by itself remove you from Google's index. What it can change is whether AI assistants and analytics tools can read your pages.