Soso Spider
Soso Spider is a search-engine crawler operated by Tencent. Its job is to find, fetch, and index web pages so they can be returned in organic search results.
Traffic is regular and bounded by your robots.txt. Allowing it is generally how your site stays discoverable through the corresponding search engine, blocking it almost always reduces visibility there.
For most sites, search-engine crawlers are still the largest source of bot traffic and the largest source of human visitors that follow.
See Soso Spider 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
DNS reverse lookup
Crawl frequency
Continuous
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
Tencent runs 6 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
3Search Engine
1- Soso SpiderYou are here
Agentic Browser
1Training Crawler
1Should I let Soso Spider through?
In most cases, yes. Blocking traditional search crawlers reduces organic-search visibility. Allowing is the default for almost all sites. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Soso Spider affect my Google rankings?
Only on Tencent Soso Spider feeds. Each search engine runs its own crawler, so blocking Soso Spider only removes you from that one index. Your visibility on Google, Bing, or anything else is untouched.
How do I confirm a request is really from Soso Spider?
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 Soso Spider", not "the traffic is genuinely Soso Spider". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Tencent to publish IP ranges.
What happens to my traffic if I block Soso Spider?
Your pages drop out of Tencent's index, which means losing the organic share you get from that engine. Not catastrophic if Tencent is a minor player, much more painful if it's a meaningful source of your traffic. Check your analytics for Tencent's actual referral share before deciding.
How is Soso Spider different from Tencent's other bots?
Tencent 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 Tencent family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Soso Spider?
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.