What it does
PetalBot is Huawei's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Petal Search / Huawei AI features. In our production Caddy block list (a production site we operate) under the SEO/data-scraper tier.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token PetalBot (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really PetalBot
Verification method (July 2026): rDNS *.petalsearch.com (community-documented; no published IP JSON)
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Confirm the source IP belongs to Huawei — published IP-range JSON where available, otherwise RDAP/rDNS on the IP. Full method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token PetalBot in robots.txt:
# Block PetalBot site-wide
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide.
Vendor documentation: https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot
Frequently asked questions
What is PetalBot?
PetalBot is Huawei's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Does PetalBot respect robots.txt?
Huawei claims PetalBot respects robots.txt, but compliance is not independently confirmed.
How do I block PetalBot?
Add 'User-agent: PetalBot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.