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. Vendor docs page returned HTTP 500 on 2026-08-22 (unreachable, not removed) — docs link may be flaky.
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)
Verify by reverse DNS: resolve the hit's source IP and confirm the hostname matches the vendor's documented pattern, then forward-resolve that hostname back to the same IP (spoofers can fake PTR records, so the forward-confirm step is load-bearing).
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Full step-by-step 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. robots.txt governs whether PetalBot may fetch; llms.txt is the separate, curated map AI assistants read once allowed in.
Vendor documentation: https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot
The Huawei family
PetalBot is the only Huawei token in our 34-bot roster — one robots.txt line covers everything Huawei operates here.
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.
How do I verify PetalBot traffic by IP?
Reverse-resolve the hit's source IP, confirm the hostname matches Huawei's documented pattern, then forward-resolve that hostname back to the same IP.
Related bots
Same vendor, then other ai search crawlers — the full directory profiles all 34.