YandexAdNet user agent, IP ranges and robots.txt

Yandex operates YandexAdNet, which it describes only as the Yandex Advertising Network robot. Yandex says it takes general robots.txt rules into account, and site owners can also address it with the token YandexAdNet. Yandex publishes no IP range list; verification is forward-confirmed reverse DNS to yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com, or the Yandex Webmaster IP check tool.

YandexAdNet shows up in logs as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexAdNet/1.0; +http://yandex.com/bots). The Yandex documentation gives a one-line description, the Yandex Advertising Network robot, and nothing more. It does not say which pages the robot fetches, how often it visits, whether it executes JavaScript, or what the Advertising Network does with the fetched content. The only thing the documentation ties the visits to is the Yandex Advertising Network, so a site owner has the name alone to explain them.

Yandex states that YandexAdNet takes general robots.txt rules into account, so a Disallow for all user agents covers it, and a group naming User-agent: YandexAdNet applies to it alone. Beyond stopping the robot's requests, the documentation does not spell out what blocking changes for a site, and Yandex does not describe the consequence for a site that takes part in the Yandex Advertising Network. There is no published IP range list for the robot, so verification relies on the same reverse DNS check Yandex documents for all its robots, plus the IP address check tool in Yandex Webmaster.

Operator note. It takes into account the general rules in robots.txt.