ERNIEBot user agent
Operated by Baidu
ERNIEBot is a Baidu crawler reported as collecting public web content for Baidu's ERNIE language models.
The ERNIEBot bot at a glance
- ERNIEBot is operated by Baidu and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models.
- The robots.txt token for ERNIEBot is ERNIEBot.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- ERNIEBot robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is ERNIEBot?
ERNIEBot is linked to Baidu’s ERNIE (Wenxin) models and is separate from Baiduspider.
Baidu has not published a crawler page for this name.
Should you block ERNIEBot?
Blocking ERNIEBot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow ERNIEBot
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 ERNIEBot is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop ERNIEBot, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block ERNIEBot
User-agent: ERNIEBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow ERNIEBot
User-agent: ERNIEBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep ERNIEBot out of private areas only
User-agent: ERNIEBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to ERNIEBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(ERNIEBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to ERNIEBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (ERNIEBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "ERNIEBot")How to verify real ERNIEBot traffic
Baidu publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for ERNIEBot, 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 ERNIEBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts ERNIEBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "ERNIEBot" 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.
ERNIEBot FAQ
ERNIEBot uses the robots.txt token "ERNIEBot". Baidu does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Baidu has not documented how ERNIEBot treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: ERNIEBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Baidu publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for ERNIEBot, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "ERNIEBot", for example with: grep -i "ERNIEBot" 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.
