PetalBot
PetalBot indexes web pages for an AI-powered search product operated by Huawei. Unlike a pure training crawler, AI search crawlers are designed to drive users back to the original source via citations and links.
The crawl pattern looks similar to a traditional search engine: regular, broad, and bounded by your robots.txt directives. The difference is that ranking is done by an LLM, not a classic ranking algorithm.
Allowing PetalBot is generally how your site stays discoverable inside AI answer engines. The traffic it sends back is small but high-intent: users who clicked a citation usually wanted exactly what you wrote.
See PetalBot on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Continuous
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
Huawei runs 4 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Share of AI bot traffic
2.0%
↑ 33% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
5.8%
↑ 41% vs 12 mo ago
Top page categories crawled
AI Search Indexs as a category, share of all bot traffic
5.9%
↑ 556% vs 12 mo ago
Sum of every ai search index we have public stats on. Compare to PetalBot's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
110 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~9 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Should I let PetalBot through?
In most cases, yes. AI search crawlers cite and link back. Allowing is how your content becomes discoverable inside AI answers. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking PetalBot affect my Google rankings?
No. PetalBot feeds Huawei's AI answer engine, which is a separate distribution channel from classical search. Blocking it removes you from citations inside Huawei's product, but Google and Bing keep ranking you the same.
How do I confirm a request is really from PetalBot?
Look at the User-Agent header in your access logs and match it against the strings listed above. Worth knowing that the User-Agent is easy to fake, so this check tells you "the traffic claims to be PetalBot", not "the traffic is genuinely PetalBot". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Huawei to publish IP ranges.
How is PetalBot different from Googlebot?
Both crawl the web, but they feed completely different surfaces. Googlebot powers Google Search, where you compete for ten blue links. PetalBot powers Huawei's AI answer engine, where you compete for one of a handful of citations in a written-out paragraph. The crawl mechanics are similar, the consumption pattern is not.
How is PetalBot different from Huawei's other bots?
Huawei splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Huawei family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control PetalBot?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.