360Spider user agent
Operated by Qihoo 360
360Spider is the crawler of 360 Search (so.com), one of the main search engines in China.
The 360Spider bot at a glance
- 360Spider is operated by Qihoo 360 and crawls web pages for a search engine index.
- The robots.txt token for 360Spider is 360Spider.
- Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from that search engine's results.
- 360Spider robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is 360Spider?
360Spider indexes pages for Qihoo 360’s search engine.
Sites targeting users in China usually allow it alongside Baiduspider.
Should you block 360Spider?
Allow 360Spider 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 360Spider
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 360Spider is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop 360Spider, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block 360Spider
User-agent: 360Spider
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow 360Spider
User-agent: 360Spider
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep 360Spider out of private areas only
User-agent: 360Spider
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to 360Spider
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(360Spider)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to 360Spider
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (360Spider) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "360Spider")How to verify real 360Spider traffic
Qihoo 360 publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for 360Spider, 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 360Spider in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts 360Spider requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "360Spider" 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.
360Spider user agent string
The full user agent Qihoo 360 publishes for 360Spider. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1; 360Spider360Spider FAQ
360Spider identifies itself with the robots.txt token "360Spider". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1; 360Spider
Qihoo 360 has not documented how 360Spider 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: 360Spider" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Qihoo 360 publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for 360Spider, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "360Spider", for example with: grep -i "360Spider" 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.
