PanguBot
Also known as Huawei PanguBot
4 min read · updated 2026-09-09
Definition
PanguBot is Huawei's crawler for collecting training data. Huawei's training crawler for Pangu. Huawei is gathering training data.
For the reference card — PanguBot in the crawler directory.
What PanguBot is
Huawei crawls for Petal Search and for its Pangu models. Like the other operators in this group it publishes reverse DNS records but no address file.
On this site PanguBot is counted as training, which is the row it appears in on your dashboard. The category matters because it decides which number moves when this crawler visits, and the four are reported separately for exactly that reason.
What its traffic looks like
Broad and slow: many pages, few repeats, spread over days or weeks rather than concentrated. Training crawls tend to want everything once, so the long tail of a site sees traffic it never gets from search — old posts, deep archive pages, anything reachable by a link. Bandwidth is the usual reason people notice these at all.
How it is verified
Checked as ip ranges + reverse dns. The user agent has to carry the token, and then the address is compared against what Huawei publishes — refetched every six hours, so a newly announced range is picked up without a deploy.
A request that matches neither is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery: a published list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence. Only a reverse DNS record resolving to somebody else produces a spoofed verdict, which is proof rather than the absence of it.
If you block it
Huawei stops collecting your pages as training material. Nothing about how you appear in search or in live answers changes — those are separate crawlers with separate rules.
Nothing you see today changes if you block this. Training crawls feed models that ship months later, so the decision is about whether your work becomes part of a commercial model, not about this quarter's traffic.
The honest counter-argument is that being in the training data is part of how a model comes to mention you at all. There is no measurement that settles this either way — anyone who tells you there is has not looked — so it is a decision about your terms rather than about your numbers.
How it differs from Huawei's other crawlers
Huawei sends 2 crawlers and gives each its own token, so they can be allowed and refused separately. The tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not:
PetalBot — search indexing. Huawei's Petal Search crawler.
Confusing two of these is the most common mistake with this operator, and it is expensive in one direction: a rule meant for the training crawler that lands on the search crawler removes you from results without stopping any training.
Questions
- Is PanguBot in my logs really Huawei?
- Not necessarily, and that is why it is worth checking. Any script can send PanguBot as its user agent. Huawei publishes the addresses its crawler uses, so the claim can be tested against them — a request from outside those ranges is recorded as unverified rather than accepted.
- How do I tell PanguBot apart from Huawei's other crawlers?
- By the token, and only by the token. Huawei also sends PetalBot, and the strings differ by a few characters while the jobs differ completely — one may be answering somebody's question while another collects training material. Match on the exact token rather than on the operator's name appearing anywhere in the header, or the four end up counted as one.
- Does PanguBot run JavaScript?
- No. It requests the HTML and leaves. That is why a browser-based analytics tag never records these visits: the tag is JavaScript, and nothing runs it. Seeing this crawler at all requires reading it server-side.
- Why is PanguBot counted as Training and not something else?
- Because that is the job this particular crawler does. Huawei runs more than one — PetalBot — and they are counted separately because the decisions about them are separate. Filing them together under one operator name would let ordinary indexing look like AI interest, which is the single most misleading thing an AI traffic report can do.
- Why does PanguBot not show up in Google Analytics?
- Google Analytics runs in the browser. This crawler never opens a browser — it requests the HTML, reads it, and leaves, so the tracking script is never executed and no event is ever sent. Every browser-based analytics tool has the same blind spot, which is why crawler traffic has to be read from the server side to be seen at all.
- What happens if a PanguBot visit cannot be verified?
- It is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A published address list can be incomplete or behind — an operator can start using a range before it appears in the file — so a miss is not evidence of anyone pretending. A visit is only marked as spoofed when the address's own reverse DNS record resolves to somebody else, which is proof rather than absence of proof.
Related
See whether PanguBot is reaching your pages.
AI crawlers take your HTML and leave without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads them server-side, checks each address against what the operator publishes, and shows you which pages were fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.