Key point. PetalBot is Huawei's AI search crawler for Petal Search. It crawls pages so Petal Search can find and cite them. It follows robots.txt.
PetalBot at a glance
These are the facts our registry holds for PetalBot, checked against Huawei's documentation on October 22, 2026.
| Vendor | Huawei |
| Used by | Petal Search |
| Purpose | AI search |
| Type | User agent |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes; source: community ai.robots.txt list (commit 9ad8a47e) |
| Vendor documentation | Huawei crawler page, checked October 22, 2026 |
| Published IP ranges | None listed in our registry |
What is PetalBot?
PetalBot is Huawei's AI search crawler for Petal Search. It crawls pages so Petal Search can find and cite them. Our registry notes: Huawei says PetalBot builds the Petal Search index, which also feeds Huawei Assistant and its AI Search.
Does PetalBot follow robots.txt?
Yes, PetalBot follows robots.txt: our registry records this from the community ai.robots.txt list (commit 9ad8a47e).
A robots.txt rule records your request. It does not prove a crawler honours it, and firewall or CDN bot settings can refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows, so check those too.
How do I block PetalBot in robots.txt?
Add a group that names PetalBot and disallows the whole site:
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /To keep it out of one folder only, disallow that path instead, for example Disallow: /private/.
How do I allow PetalBot?
PetalBot is allowed by default: if no group names it and no User-agent: * rule blocks it, it may read every page. A crawler obeys the most specific group that names it and falls back to User-agent: * only when no group names it (RFC 9309), so if a catch-all rule blocks crawlers, add a group for it:
User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /Want the exact block for every AI crawler at once? Our robots.txt generator for AI crawlers writes it for each choice.
How can I tell if a request really comes from PetalBot?
Treat the name alone as a claim. User agents can be faked, and our registry lists no published IP-range file for PetalBot, so there is no list to match the request's address against.
How often do startup websites block PetalBot?
We have no figure for PetalBot: it was not one of the crawlers our AI Crawler Access Report tracked. For the crawlers it did track, the headline figure is: “3 of 569 startup websites (0.5%; 95% interval 0.2% to 1.5%) block at least one AI search crawler (Elementera AI Crawler Access Report, October 2026).”
The method and the per-crawler table are in the AI Crawler Access Report.
How do I check whether my robots.txt blocks PetalBot?
Paste your robots.txt into our free checker and it shows, crawler by crawler, whether PetalBot may read the path you choose. Nothing you paste leaves the page.