Daum user agent
Operated by Kakao
Daum is the crawler of the Daum portal and search engine in South Korea, run by Kakao.
The Daum bot at a glance
- Daum is operated by Kakao and crawls web pages for a search engine index.
- The robots.txt token for Daum is Daum.
- Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from that search engine's results.
- Daum robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is Daum?
Daum indexes pages for Daum search, the second largest portal in South Korea after Naver.
Kakao’s former crawler help page no longer loads.
Should you block Daum?
Allow Daum 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 | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow Daum
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 Daum is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop Daum, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block Daum
User-agent: Daum
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Daum
User-agent: Daum
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Daum out of private areas only
User-agent: Daum
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Daum
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Daum)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Daum
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Daum) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Daum")How to verify real Daum traffic
Kakao publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Daum, 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 Daum in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Daum requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Daum" 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.
Daum user agent string
The full user agent Kakao publishes for Daum. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Daum/4.1; +http://cs.daum.net/faq/15/4118.html?faqId=28966)Daum FAQ
Daum identifies itself with the robots.txt token "Daum". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Daum/4.1; +http://cs.daum.net/faq/15/4118.html?faqId=28966)
Kakao has not documented how Daum treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
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: Daum" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Kakao publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Daum, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Daum", for example with: grep -i "Daum" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. 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.
