ByteDance · Other AI bots
Doubaobot
ByteDance’s Doubao product crawler. Allow it if Doubao should be able to fetch your pages; block at the edge if you want a hard no.
- Operator
- ByteDance
- 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 Doubaobot in extra product or version text.
Doubaobot
What Doubaobot does
Doubaobot fetches pages for ByteDance’s Doubao assistant experiences. Bytespider remains the broader collector.
How to get discovered
Allow Doubaobot when that product matters to you. Serve HTML; do not assume it renders a SPA.
Why Doubaobot might skip you
Company-wide ByteDance blocks, or robots that only name Bytespider.
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 Doubaobot eligible to fetch this site
User-agent: Doubaobot
Allow: /ByteDance has not published a machine-readable range file for this token. Do not treat the user-agent alone as proof of identity.
JavaScript: reads raw HTML only.
Other ByteDance 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.
Doubaobot FAQ
What is Doubaobot?
Doubaobot fetches pages for ByteDance’s Doubao assistant experiences. Bytespider remains the broader collector.
Should I allow Doubaobot in robots.txt?
Yes if you want ByteDance to be able to fetch and cite this site. Blocking Doubaobot is how pages stay invisible to that product even when Googlebot still crawls them.
How do I know a request is really Doubaobot?
ByteDance 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 Doubaobot 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.
