YandexCheckBot
Yandex operates YandexCheckBot, which downloads pages from websites in different regions of the world to check their availability to users. It makes no indexing requests. The robots.txt token is YandexCheckBot, and general rules do not apply to it. Site owners verify it by reverse DNS to yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com with forward DNS confirmation; Yandex publishes no IP list.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexCheckBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)What YandexCheckBot does
The user agent appears as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexCheckBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)". Yandex says the robot downloads pages from different regions of the world to check whether they are available to users, and that it does not make indexing requests. A site owner will therefore see page downloads that come from Yandex hosts but do not feed the search index. Yandex does not document which regions the checks come from or how often they run, and it does not say how it selects pages.
Allowing YandexCheckBot lets Yandex run those availability checks against your pages. Blocking it under the YandexCheckBot token stops the checks but has no documented effect on indexing, because the robot does not make indexing requests in the first place. Yandex marks the general robots.txt rules column as No for this robot, so a "User-agent: *" Disallow does not reach it; you have to name YandexCheckBot in its own group. Yandex does not say whether the robot executes JavaScript or what it does with the availability results.
Operator note. It does not take into account the general rules in robots.txt.
Controlling YandexCheckBot with robots.txt
Use the token YandexCheckBot in robots.txt. Yandex documents limits on how this bot applies robots.txt; see the operator note.
User-agent: YandexCheckBot
Disallow: /User-agent: YandexCheckBot
Allow: /Verifying a request is really YandexCheckBot
Anyone can put YandexCheckBot in a User-Agent header. Reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP must return a host ending in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com, and a forward DNS lookup of that host must return the same IP. Yandex Webmaster also provides an IP address check tool.
host <request-ip>
# expect a hostname ending in yandex.ru, yandex.net, yandex.com
host <that-hostname>
# expect it to resolve back to <request-ip>Common questions
Should I block YandexCheckBot?
There is little documented reason to. The robot only checks page availability from different regions and does not make indexing requests, so blocking it neither protects nor removes anything from Yandex search. If you do block it, use a robots.txt group naming YandexCheckBot, since Yandex says general rules do not apply to it.
Does YandexCheckBot affect my Yandex rankings?
Yandex's documentation does not say. It states only that the robot downloads pages to check their availability to users and does not make indexing requests. No link between the availability checks and search ranking is documented.
How do I verify YandexCheckBot?
Do a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP; the host must end in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com. Then do a forward DNS lookup of that host and confirm it returns the same IP. Yandex Webmaster's IP address check tool does the same check. Yandex does not publish IP ranges.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against Yandex's own documentation, listed below, and re-checked by a second reviewer before publication. Reviewed September 2026.
Related crawlers
This registry documents how operators describe their own bots so site owners can identify and control them. It does not publish third-party IP lists or guess at undocumented behaviour. To see how your own site responds to automated visitors, the bot detection scanner reads a URL's live response and names the protection it finds.