PetalBot: Huawei's Search Crawler
What is PetalBot?
PetalBot is Huawei's crawler for the Petal search engine, and it builds the index behind Petal Search, Huawei Assistant and Huawei AI Search. PetalBot builds a conventional search index the way Baiduspider does, so the AI Search surface Huawei names draws on that same index rather than on a separate training crawl.
Key facts
- PetalBot is operated by Huawei, and its purpose is classic search: conventional search indexing.
- The user agent for PetalBot is documented by Huawei and contains the token PetalBot.
- The robots.txt token for PetalBot is PetalBot, and Huawei documents that PetalBot respects that rule.
- PetalBot can send a visitor to your site, and PetalBot attaches a linked citation when it uses your content.
Specification
| Operator | Huawei |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Classic searchConventional search indexing. On some engines the same index also feeds AI-generated answer surfaces. |
| Agent kind | CrawlerAutonomous crawler. Appears in your logs under its own user-agent. |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot) |
| robots.txt token | PetalBot |
| robots.txt compliance | Documented: respects robots.txt |
| Verification | Reverse DNS, forward confirmed.petalsearch.com |
| Sends referral traffic | Yes |
| Attaches a citation | Yes |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | indexing |
| Source | Operator documentationhttps://aspiegel.com/petalbot/ |
| Verified on |
What this looks like in your logs
203.0.113.42 - - [15/Sep/2026:09:14:07 +0000] "GET /pricing HTTP/1.1" 200 18432 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot; +https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)"
The part that identifies the request is the token PetalBot, inside the quoted user-agent field at the end of the line. Everything before it is the ordinary shape of a Common Log Format entry, and the address shown is a documentation address rather than one Huawei uses.
What PetalBot does not do
PetalBot does not guarantee a visit, because a read only becomes a visit if a person clicks the citation that came out of it.
PetalBot does not train a model on what it reads, and it has no part in what any other search engine shows.
Huawei publishes no crawl frequency for PetalBot, so any schedule you read elsewhere is somebody's estimate rather than a documented figure.
How Kymo classifies it
Kymo files PetalBot under Huawei as indexing, classified from the HTTP request on the server rather than from anything running in a browser.
A hit from PetalBot appears on the Crawlers dashboard and is deliberately left out of the AI Visibility numbers. An index sweep produces no click to miss, so counting it there would inflate the read number and break its relationship to the visitor number beside it.
Allow it or block it
Blocking PetalBot removes your pages from Petal Search, and from the Huawei Assistant and AI Search surfaces that read the same index. Huawei states an entry already in the index can take several months to clear after a block.
| Allow it if | Block it if |
|---|---|
| You want to appear in Huawei search results. | Huawei sends you no traffic worth the crawl, which is usually a question of language and region. |
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address PetalBot only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot Allow: /
Block PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot Disallow: /
Questions
How do I know a request claiming to be PetalBot is genuine?
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting address, confirm it ends in .petalsearch.com, then run a forward lookup on that name and check it returns the same address. A user-agent string alone proves nothing.
Does blocking PetalBot affect my Google ranking?
No. A Google ranking is decided by Googlebot, which is a separate crawler. Each search engine runs its own crawler and its own index, so blocking PetalBot removes you from Huawei results and leaves Google untouched.
Will I see PetalBot in Google Analytics?
No. Google Analytics runs a JavaScript tag in a visitor's browser, and PetalBot reads your HTML and leaves without running any script. Server-side logging is the only way to record it.
Does PetalBot send traffic back to my site?
Yes. PetalBot builds an index that Huawei cites its sources from, and a citation there is a link a person can click. A crawl is still not a visit, so expect the read count to run far ahead of the click count.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
PetalBot decides whether you appear in Huawei results, and a browser tag cannot tell you whether it ever came.
Kymo reads the HTTP request on your server, so a crawler that never runs JavaScript is still recorded. You see which bots reached the site, which pages they took and how often, next to your human traffic.
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