Teoma
Teoma is a search-engine crawler operated by Ask. 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 Teoma 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
Ask runs 2 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
1Search Engine
1- TeomaYou are here
Should I let Teoma 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 Teoma affect my Google rankings?
Only on Ask Teoma feeds. Each search engine runs its own crawler, so blocking Teoma 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 Teoma?
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 Teoma", not "the traffic is genuinely Teoma". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Ask to publish IP ranges.
What happens to my traffic if I block Teoma?
Your pages drop out of Ask's index, which means losing the organic share you get from that engine. Not catastrophic if Ask is a minor player, much more painful if it's a meaningful source of your traffic. Check your analytics for Ask's actual referral share before deciding.
How is Teoma different from Ask's other bots?
Ask 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 Ask family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Teoma?
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.