What is PetalBot?
Petal Search's crawler, which indexes PC and mobile sites for Petal Search and for content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.
- Operator
- Huawei
- Purpose
- AI search index
- Feeds
- Petal Search, Huawei Assistant, Huawei AI Search
- robots.txt token
PetalBot- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- IP ranges
- Not published
- Source
- Huawei documentation
PetalBot user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
Primary value is the published PC string; the variant is the mobile string.
Match it in robots.txt with the token PetalBot. User agents can be faked, so check requests against the operator's verification method before trusting them. Do a reverse DNS lookup, then a forward lookup that must return the original IP. The doc is inconsistent: its steps say the hostname should be in aspiegel.com, but its example resolves to petalbot-*.petalsearch.com.
Should you block PetalBot?
Banning PetalBot makes your site's pages unsearchable in Petal Search; pages already indexed may take several months to be removed.
Yes. Huawei says PetalBot follows robots.txt. “PetalBot complies with the Internet robots protocol.”
Block PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot Disallow: /
Allow PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot Allow: /
PetalBot FAQ
What is PetalBot?
Petal Search's crawler, which indexes PC and mobile sites for Petal Search and for content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.
What is the PetalBot user agent?
PetalBot identifies itself as: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot). In robots.txt, match it with the token "PetalBot".
Does PetalBot respect robots.txt?
Yes. Huawei says PetalBot follows robots.txt.
How do I block PetalBot?
Add "User-agent: PetalBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Banning PetalBot makes your site's pages unsearchable in Petal Search; pages already indexed may take several months to be removed.
Crawlable isn't the same as cited
Letting AI crawlers in is step one. Citedify checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually recommend your brand, and what to fix when they don't.
Facts on this page come from Huawei's documentation, checked 2026-09-28. Sources: webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot