Yandex
YandexBot
Yandex's search crawler.
When you see it: Ordinary Yandex indexing.
How we check it is really Yandex
- 01
The user agent has to contain YandexBot.
- 02
The address is compared against Yandex's published ranges, which we refetch every six hours.
- 03
If the ranges do not settle it, the address's reverse DNS record is resolved and then resolved forward again, so a faked record cannot pass.
A visit that matches neither is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A range list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence.
What each result means
- verified
- The address matched Yandex's own published records. This really was them.
- unverified
- We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
- spoofed
- The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.
The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.
No list to check against
Yandex publishes no machine-readable address file for this crawler, so verification runs through reverse DNS instead — its records resolve under .spider.yandex.com, .yandex.ru, .yandex.net.
- Operator
- Yandex
- Token
- YandexBot
- Counted as
- Search indexing
- Verification
- IP ranges + reverse DNS
- Runs JavaScript
- No
- Operator docs
- None published
Yandex publishes no crawler documentation. This token is recognised from observed traffic and community lists, so treat the classification as our reading rather than the operator's statement.
User agent
YandexBotMatched as a token, not as a full browser string. Yandex adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching YandexBot keeps working. The same string is what Yandex names in robots.txt.
Your analytics never mentioned YandexBot because it cannot see it.
This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.