What PetalBot does
PetalBot is an automatic program of the Petal search engine, operated by Huawei, that indexes content for Petal Search, Huawei Assistant, and AI Search services. It crawls with desktop and mobile user-agent strings that both contain "PetalBot" and link to the Petal Search webmaster page. The bot complies with the Internet robots protocol and adjusts its crawl rate based on server capacity and website quality to avoid placing an unreasonable burden on sites.
How to control PetalBot
Target PetalBot in your robots.txt with the PetalBot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot
Allow: /Block PetalBot
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /Legitimate PetalBot traffic can be verified by a reverse DNS lookup confirming the hostname is in the aspiegel.com domain followed by a forward DNS check, and after a robots.txt block it may take several months for already indexed pages to be cleared from the index.
How to identify PetalBot
Temso identifies PetalBottraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
PetalBotPetalBot FAQ
What is PetalBot?
PetalBot is the crawler of Huawei's Petal search engine, indexing content for Petal Search, Huawei Assistant, and AI Search services. It appears in logs with desktop and mobile user-agent strings containing "PetalBot".
How do I block PetalBot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: PetalBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to block it site-wide, or a narrower Disallow path for specific sections; PetalBot complies with the robots protocol. Be aware that pages already in the index may take several months to be cleared after blocking.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
