baidu: User Agent, robots.txt Rules & Safety Rating

Q: What is the official user-agent string for baidu?

The official user-agent string for baidu is: baidu . This is the exact string you must use in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, but the string must be spelled correctly. You can verify that a request genuinely comes from baidu by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP - legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain.

Q: Is baidu safe?

Yes, baidu is a safe and legitimate crawler. It is operated by Baidu, which publicly documents its crawler at an official URL and follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309). The user-agent string baidu is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility).

Q: Will blocking baidu hurt my SEO?

⛔ Critical Impact - Blocking baidu will stop Baidu from crawling and indexing your pages. Within days or weeks you may see pages drop out of Baidu's search index entirely, resulting in a significant loss of organic search traffic. This is the most severe possible SEO consequence. Only do this intentionally, for example if you are migrating to a different search engine or decommissioning a domain. If you accidentally blocked baidu, remove the rule immediately and request re-indexing via Baidu's webmaster tools.

Q: How do I block baidu in robots.txt?

Add the following lines to your /robots.txt file: User-agent: baidu Disallow: / This instructs baidu not to crawl any path on your site. The Disallow: / directive covers the entire domain including subfolders. To only block specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g., Disallow: /blog/ ). Note: robots.txt is publicly readable - any bot or human can inspect it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt .

Q: How do I verify if baidu is crawling my site?

Search your web server access logs for the string baidu (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "baidu" /var/log/nginx/access.log ). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For baidu specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).

Quick Facts

User-Agent:: baidu
Category:: Search Engines
Operator:: Baidu
Safety:: Safe
Blocking Impact:: Critical - Blocking removes you from search results
SEO Impact Score:: 10/10
Official docs:: help.baidu.com

Confirmed by the operator

Baidu names baidu on its own documentation page, linked above. The token, purpose and robots.txt behaviour on this profile come from that page, re-checked on October 19, 2026.

What is baidu?

A common token or alias associated with Baidu's crawling activities, often seen alongside Baiduspider.

A common token or alias associated with Baidu's crawling activities, often seen alongside Baiduspider.
baidu is a production-grade search engine crawler operated by Baidu. It uses a distributed crawl infrastructure that respects crawl-delay directives, follows RFC 9309 (robots.txt) spec, and processes Sitemaps to prioritise fresh content. The user-agent string baidu must be whitelisted if your site uses rate-limiting or WAF rules. Blocking impact is Critical - Blocking removes you from search results.

What happens if you block baidu?

⛔ Critical Impact - Blocking baidu will stop Baidu from crawling and indexing your pages. Within days or weeks you may see pages drop out of Baidu's search index entirely, resulting in a significant loss of organic search traffic. This is the most severe possible SEO consequence. Only do this intentionally, for example if you are migrating to a different search engine or decommissioning a domain. If you accidentally blocked baidu, remove the rule immediately and request re-indexing via Baidu's webmaster tools.

Never block - it will remove your site from major search results.

How to block baidu with robots.txt

<code>User-agent: baidu</code> - Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.

Block completely (robots.txt)

User-agent: baidu
Disallow: /

Allow all (robots.txt)

User-agent: baidu
Allow: /

Block private only (robots.txt)

User-agent: baidu
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /admin/
Allow: /

Nginx server block

# Nginx: Hard-block baidu
if ($http_user_agent ~* "baidu") {
    return 403 "Bot blocked";
}

Apache .htaccess

# Apache: Hard-block baidu
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "baidu" bad_bot
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot

Meta robots tag

X-Robots-Tag header

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

Is baidu safe to allow?

Yes, baidu is a safe and legitimate crawler. It is operated by Baidu, which publicly documents its crawler at an official URL and follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309). The user-agent string baidu is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility).

Verify by reverse-DNS lookup: legitimate baidu requests resolve to baidu's domain.

What does baidu do?

Understanding baidu's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.

Crawls and indexes web pages for search results
Discovers new and updated content on your website
Analyzes page structure, content, and links for ranking
Renders JavaScript to understand dynamic content
Checks for mobile-friendliness and page speed

baidu in context

baidu is a search engine crawler operated by Baidu. In plain terms, it builds a search or answer index. Our database files it under search engines and ranks it Tier 3, mid-priority crawlers with a clear purpose but a smaller audience. 62 of the 63 search engines in our database share this tier.

Its safety rating is safe and its blocking impact is critical. So baidu is both well behaved and costly to lose: the strongest case for allowing it. How we rate safety and impact.

How site owners treat baidu

Our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 did not track baidu as a named token, so we do not publish an adoption figure for it. If you run a large site, your own logs are the best evidence of how often it visits.

Does it follow robots.txt?

baidu's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the baidu rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

Baidu crawlers and close alternatives

baidu is one of 10 Baidu crawlers in our database. A User-agent: baidu group controls baidu only; the other Baidu tokens below need their own lines.

baidu: this crawler (Tier 3)
Baiduspider: Baidu Search, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-ads: Baidu Business Search, checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-cpro: Baidu Union, checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-favo: Baidu Bookmark, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-image: Baidu Image Search, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-news: Baidu News Search, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
Baiduspider-video: Baidu Video Search, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
ERNIEBot: ERNIE (Baidu), collects pages to train AI models (Tier 2)

To give baidu the same answer as its siblings, stack User-agent: baidu with their lines above one set of rules; to treat baidu differently, give it its own group.

Other search engines that do the same job (builds a search or answer index) include Amzn-SearchBot from Amazon, Applebot from Apple, bingbot from Microsoft, BingPreview from Microsoft, BingVideoPreview from Microsoft, DuckDuckBot from DuckDuckGo. Deciding about baidu is usually a decision about the whole group, so check how your file treats these too.

We first recorded baidu on March 17, 2026. Baidu documents it on help.baidu.com, and we recheck that page before each release.

Which rule baidu actually follows

baidu reads exactly one group in robots.txt, the most specific one that names baidu, and never combines rules across groups. This short file shows the trap:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

User-agent: baidu
Disallow: /drafts/

Find the group. baidu looks for a group naming baidu. One exists, so it ignores User-agent: * completely.
Apply only that group. It is refused /drafts/ and nothing else.
The surprise. /private/ is open to baidu, because that rule lives in the * group it no longer reads. To keep it out of both, repeat Disallow: /private/ inside its own group.

Test yourself: does a rule under User-agent: * apply to baidu if the file also has a User-agent: baidu group?

No. Once a group names it, baidu reads only that group. Put every rule you want it to follow inside its own group.

Test yourself: will blocking baidu remove your pages from AI answers?

Often, yes. baidu is a search engine crawler, so pages it cannot fetch can drop out of the answers or results it supports.

Test yourself: is User-agent: baidu the same as User-agent: baidu?

Yes. RFC 9309 makes user-agent matching case-insensitive. Paths are a different story: Disallow: /Blog/ does not block /blog/.

Should you allow baidu? Decide by situation

Recommended setting for baidu by type of site
If you are...	Recommended setting
You publish content and want AI answers to cite it	Allow it. It is how this search engine finds your pages.
You license content and want to stop AI training	Blocking it does not stop training, because baidu is a search engine crawler. Block the operator's training crawler instead.
You run an online shop	Allow it unless it is overloading your servers.
Your server is under load from bots	Rate-limit before blocking. It is rated safe in our database.

Check baidu on your own site

Open /robots.txt on your domain and search for baidu. If it is not named, it follows User-agent: *.
List the Disallow lines in the group baidu follows and test your key URLs against them; the longest match wins, and Allow wins a tie.
Look beyond the file. A firewall or bot manager can refuse baidu even when robots.txt allows it, and that never shows in the file.
Run our GPTBot and ClaudeBot access check to see how baidu and every other crawler we track are treated in one pass, including firewall refusals.

Common mistakes with baidu

The errors we see most often with baidu in the files and firewalls we test:

Blocking baidu 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: baidu group to add one rule for baidu and accidentally dropping every rule it used to follow under User-agent: *.
Disallowing CSS and JavaScript folders, which can stop baidu rendering your pages properly.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check baidu from outside after every change.

Spotting baidu in your logs

robots.txt says what baidu may do; your access logs show what it 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 "baidu" /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 "baidu" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

Check the requests are genuine

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

baidu: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where the operator documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable baidu request with caution.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the official user-agent string for baidu?

The official user-agent string for baidu is: baidu. This is the exact string you must use in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, but the string must be spelled correctly. You can verify that a request genuinely comes from baidu by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP - legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain.

Is baidu safe?

Yes, baidu is a safe and legitimate crawler. It is operated by Baidu, which publicly documents its crawler at an official URL and follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309). The user-agent string baidu is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility).

Will blocking baidu hurt my SEO?

⛔ Critical Impact - Blocking baidu will stop Baidu from crawling and indexing your pages. Within days or weeks you may see pages drop out of Baidu's search index entirely, resulting in a significant loss of organic search traffic. This is the most severe possible SEO consequence. Only do this intentionally, for example if you are migrating to a different search engine or decommissioning a domain. If you accidentally blocked baidu, remove the rule immediately and request re-indexing via Baidu's webmaster tools.

How do I block baidu in robots.txt?

Add the following lines to your /robots.txt file:

User-agent: baidu
Disallow: /

This instructs baidu not to crawl any path on your site. The Disallow: / directive covers the entire domain including subfolders. To only block specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g., Disallow: /blog/). Note: robots.txt is publicly readable - any bot or human can inspect it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

Does baidu respect robots.txt?

Yes - baidu is a well-behaved bot operated by Baidu. It fetches and parses /robots.txt before crawling any page, following RFC 9309.

How do I verify if baidu is crawling my site?

Search your web server access logs for the string baidu (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "baidu" /var/log/nginx/access.log). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For baidu specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).

What is the crawl frequency of baidu?

Critical-impact search crawlers like baidu typically crawl popular pages daily and less popular pages weekly. You can manage crawl rate via the crawl-delay directive or via the search console.

Can I block baidu from specific pages only?

Yes. Instead of a global Disallow: / you can restrict baidu to specific paths:

User-agent: baidu
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /staging/
Allow: /

This allows baidu everywhere except the listed paths. Path matching in robots.txt uses prefix matching - Disallow: /private/ blocks /private/page.html but NOT /public/private/.

How do I check if baidu is blocked by my robots.txt?

Use Google's robots.txt Tester in Search Console, or a third-party checker to simulate a baidu request. You can also manually check by opening https://aicrawlercheck.com/robots.txt and scanning for baidu entries. If a block exists, immediately test it against your most important URLs using the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool.

My site is blocked by baidu in Search Console - what do I do?

1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any User-agent: baidu or User-agent: * Disallow rules covering your key pages.
2. Remove or restrict the blocking rules.
3. Validate via Google Search Console → robots.txt Tester.
4. Request re-indexing using the URL Inspection tool.
5. Wait 1-2 weeks for re-crawl. Monitor Coverage report for recovery.