Qwantbot user agent
Operated by Qwant
Qwantbot is Qwant's crawler that indexes pages for the Qwant search engine in Europe.
The Qwantbot bot at a glance
- Qwantbot is operated by Qwant and crawls web pages for a search engine index.
- The robots.txt token for Qwantbot is Qwantbot.
- Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from that search engine's results.
- Qwantbot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is Qwantbot?
Qwantbot collects pages for Qwant search, which is popular in France.
Qwant documents how to control Qwantbot with robots.txt.
Should you block Qwantbot?
Allow Qwantbot unless it causes a measurable load problem.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from that search engine's results. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | AI features built on that search index, such as Google AI Overviews and AI Mode on top of Googlebot, also lose access to your pages. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow Qwantbot
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 Qwantbot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block Qwantbot
User-agent: Qwantbot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Qwantbot
User-agent: Qwantbot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Qwantbot out of private areas only
User-agent: Qwantbot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Qwantbot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Qwantbot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Qwantbot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Qwantbot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Qwantbot")How to verify real Qwantbot traffic
Qwant publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Qwantbot, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find Qwantbot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Qwantbot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Qwantbot" 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.
Qwantbot FAQ
Qwantbot uses the robots.txt token "Qwantbot". Qwant does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Yes. Qwant states that Qwantbot follows robots.txt rules written for the "Qwantbot" token.
Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from that search engine's results. AI features built on that search index, such as Google AI Overviews and AI Mode on top of Googlebot, also lose access to your pages.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: Qwantbot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Qwant publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Qwantbot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Qwantbot", for example with: grep -i "Qwantbot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Qwant 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.
