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PetalBot: Huawei's Petal Search crawler
PetalBot is the crawler for Huawei's Petal Search. Huawei documents that its index also powers content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search, so one block removes you from all three. It respects robots.txt, but clearing pages already indexed can take months. Verify a visit by reverse DNS with a forward lookup, because the header alone proves nothing.
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0requests filed as PetalBot · 30 days
of 143,601 AI crawler requests from 7 operators
| Agent | AI requests, 30 days | attensira.com robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| PetalBot (this page) | 0 | Wildcard |
| bingbot | 541 | Allowed |
| Googlebot | 189 | Allowed |
| Applebot | 0 | Allowed |
| Googlebot-Image | 0 | Parent's rule |
| Googlebot-Video | 0 | Parent's rule |
| GoogleOther | 0 | Allowed |
| GoogleOther-Image | 0 | Parent's rule |
| Kagibot | 0 | Wildcard |
2 of 9 had requests filed in the window. User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP, and our live robots.txt · · n=143,601 AI requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block PetalBot in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves PetalBot today.
# Block Petal Search entirely — this removes you from# Petal's services.User-agent: PetalBotDisallow: / # Or the conditional form Huawei's own page gives, in# place of the line above:# Allow: /w/api/# Disallow: /trap/# No group names PetalBot, so it reads the wildcard group.User-agent: *Allow: /Disallow: /api/We do not name PetalBot. It falls through to the wildcard group, which allows everything except /api/.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs PetalBot, and what is it for?
Huawei runs it, and we file it under search indexing. Indexes pages for Petal Search, whose index Huawei says also powers content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search.
From Huawei’s documentation, read . Why a training fetch and a search fetch are different decisions: the AI crawler guide.
What does one PetalBot rule reach?
In the four-way taxonomy of the AI crawler guide this is search indexing. What sets PetalBot apart is that the surfaces are plural and the control is not. OpenAI and Google publish separate tokens for separate jobs; Huawei publishes one. Petal Search, Huawei Assistant and AI Search are decided together, and Huawei says a ban makes your pages and all search engine services provided by Petal unsearchable.4
There is no rule that keeps the search listing and declines the AI recommendation, because the operator has not published a token for it.
Why are my pages still in Petal Search after a block?
Huawei says clearing index information already established may take several months after PetalBot stops accessing the pages.5 Escalating to a network-layer block does not speed that up. It only stops PetalBot from recrawling the pages, which leaves the stale entries where they are.
How do I verify that a visit really came from PetalBot?
Reverse-resolve the address, check the domain, then forward-resolve the hostname and confirm it returns the original address.6 Huawei's written step names aspiegel.com, while its worked example resolves to a petalbot-114-119-128-10.petalsearch.com hostname, so this page accepts both suffixes. The forward lookup is what settles it: a reverse record alone is set by whoever holds the address block. The full procedure is in verifying a crawler.
- Reverse DNS ends in
- *.aspiegel.com*.petalsearch.com
Huawei publishes no IP range file for PetalBot; verify by the reverse-DNS lookup.
ResearcherTranscribed from Huawei documentation · What user-agent string does PetalBot send?
Match the token, never the version. A rule pinned to a version stops matching silently the next time the operator ships.
The version in this string changes; check Huawei’s page before relying on the exact text.
What does allowing PetalBot cost?
Allowing it costs crawl load and keeps you in Petal Search, Huawei Assistant and Huawei's AI Search, which all draw on the same index. Blocking it removes you from all three, and pages already indexed can take months to clear.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https:/Should I allow PetalBot in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
PetalBot is adding noticeable load and you are deciding whether to block it outright.
Use path rules first, and treat a whole-site disallow as withdrawing from Petal's services.
Huawei states that banning PetalBot will make the pages on your site and all search engine services provided by Petal unsearchable in the Petal search engine, and separately that it adjusts crawling based on factors including server capacity and site quality. A scoped rule usually addresses the load without the second cost.
You blocked PetalBot weeks ago and your pages still appear in Petal Search, so you assume the rule was ignored.
Verify the rule is being read, then wait, rather than escalating to a network block.
Huawei documents that it takes time to update data in the search engine index database, and that clearing index information already established may take several months after PetalBot has stopped accessing the pages. Continued presence in results is therefore consistent with the rule working exactly as documented.
A log filter written from a blog post is not matching the PetalBot traffic you can see in raw logs.
Match the bare token PetalBot, case-insensitively, rather than either published header.
The two published headers differ in whitespace in a way that is easy to normalise away by accident — the PC form has no space after "compatible;" and the mobile form has none before the plus sign. A filter written against a retyped full string misses one of the two forms and reports a fraction of the real traffic.
What else do people ask?
What is PetalBot?
Does PetalBot respect robots.txt?
What do I lose by blocking PetalBot?
Where do these facts come from?
6 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.
Huawei documents PetalBot as an automatic program of the Petal search engine whose function is to access both PC and mobile websites and establish an index database, enabling users to search site content in Petal search engine and presenting content recommendations in Huawei Assistant and AI Search services, both powered by Petal Search.
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“The function of PetalBot is to access both PC and mobile websites and establish an index database which enables users to search the content of your site in Petal search engine”
Huawei publishes PetalBot's PC user agent as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)" and its mobile user agent as "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)".
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)”
Huawei states that PetalBot complies with the Internet robots protocol and that the robots.txt file can be used to completely prevent PetalBot from accessing a website or to prevent it from accessing some files.
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“PetalBot complies with the Internet robots protocol.”
Huawei states that banning PetalBot from accessing a site will make the pages on that site and all search engine services provided by Petal unsearchable in the Petal search engine.
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“Banning PetalBot from accessing your site will make the pages on your site and all search engine services provided by Petal unsearchable in the Petal search engine.”
Huawei states that it takes time to update data in the search engine index database, and that although PetalBot has stopped accessing the pages on a site it may take several months to clear the page index information that has already been established.
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“it may take several months to clear the page index information that has already been established”
Huawei documents verifying PetalBot by running a reverse DNS lookup on the accessing IP address, verifying that the domain name is in aspiegel.com, then running a forward DNS lookup on that domain name and verifying it matches the original address; the worked example on the same page resolves an address to a petalsearch.com hostname.
aspiegel.com · retrieved
“Verify that the domain name is in aspiegel.com.”
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