Alibaba · Other AI bots
AliyunBot
Alibaba Cloud’s crawler token. Usually an infrastructure/product fetch, not ChatGPT search — still needs a 200 if you want those products to read you.
- Operator
- Alibaba
- Traffic type
- Other AI bots
- Verification
- Not independently verifiable
- robots.txt
- Compliance not documented
Usually means: Link-preview, ads, and product fetchers. Allow them if you want unfurls and landing-page fetches to work; they are not the citation path.
User-agent
robots.txt and most WAF rules match the token, not the full Mozilla string. Operators often wrap AliyunBot in extra product or version text.
AliyunBot
What AliyunBot does
AliyunBot identifies Alibaba Cloud fetches of public URLs. It is not Googlebot and not Qwen-User.
How to get discovered
Allow AliyunBot on public docs if Alibaba Cloud products should ingest them. It will not replace OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT.
Why AliyunBot might skip you
Unknown-bot blocks on API docs hosts, or robots Disallow on /docs.
robots.txt rule
Allow this token on public pages you want retrieved or cited. A CDN “Block AI bots” toggle can still 403 it after robots.txt says Allow.
# Keep AliyunBot eligible to fetch this site
User-agent: AliyunBot
Allow: /Alibaba has not published a machine-readable range file for this token. Do not treat the user-agent alone as proof of identity.
JavaScript: render behavior is not documented.
Other Alibaba bots
Training, search, and user-fetch tokens from the same operator are not interchangeable. Allow the discovery path even when you opt out of training.
AliyunBot FAQ
What is AliyunBot?
AliyunBot identifies Alibaba Cloud fetches of public URLs. It is not Googlebot and not Qwen-User.
Should I allow AliyunBot in robots.txt?
Yes if you want Alibaba to be able to fetch and cite this site. Blocking AliyunBot is how pages stay invisible to that product even when Googlebot still crawls them.
How do I know a request is really AliyunBot?
Alibaba has not published a range file for this token. Treat the user-agent as a claimed identity, and do not build a hard IP allowlist from blog posts or screenshots.
Letting AliyunBot in is the start. Getting cited is the job.
Rankealo checks whether AI crawlers can reach you, then publishes pages built to be retrieved and quoted in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
