MistralAI-Index user agent
Operated by Mistral AI
MistralAI-Index is Mistral's crawler that indexes pages for search in Mistral's products.
The MistralAI-Index bot at a glance
- MistralAI-Index is operated by Mistral AI and indexes web pages so an AI search product can show and cite them in answers.
- The robots.txt token for MistralAI-Index is MistralAI-Index.
- Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- MistralAI-Index robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is MistralAI-Index?
MistralAI-Index builds the index that Mistral’s assistant can search and cite.
Blocking it removes a site from that index.
Should you block MistralAI-Index?
Allow MistralAI-Index unless it causes a measurable load problem.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking removes your pages from that AI search index, so its answers can no longer cite or link to your website. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow MistralAI-Index
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token MistralAI-Index is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block MistralAI-Index
User-agent: MistralAI-Index
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow MistralAI-Index
User-agent: MistralAI-Index
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep MistralAI-Index out of private areas only
User-agent: MistralAI-Index
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to MistralAI-Index
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(MistralAI\-Index)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to MistralAI-Index
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (MistralAI\-Index) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "MistralAI-Index")How to verify real MistralAI-Index traffic
Mistral AI publishes the IP ranges that MistralAI-Index uses. A request with the MistralAI-Index user agent from an IP outside that list is an impersonator.
How to find MistralAI-Index in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts MistralAI-Index requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "MistralAI-Index" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
MistralAI-Index user agent string
The full user agent Mistral AI publishes for MistralAI-Index. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MistralAI-Index/1.0; +https://docs.mistral.ai/robots)MistralAI-Index FAQ
MistralAI-Index identifies itself with the robots.txt token "MistralAI-Index". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MistralAI-Index/1.0; +https://docs.mistral.ai/robots)
Yes. Mistral AI states that MistralAI-Index follows robots.txt rules written for the "MistralAI-Index" token.
Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking removes your pages from that AI search index, so its answers can no longer cite or link to your website.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: MistralAI-Index" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Yes. Mistral AI publishes the IP ranges MistralAI-Index uses. Check the request IP against that list; a matching user agent from any other IP is an impersonator.
Search your server access log for "MistralAI-Index", for example with: grep -i "MistralAI-Index" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Mistral AI crawler documentation. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
