What Qwantbot does
Qwantbot is the web crawler Qwant uses to enhance its search index. It identifies itself with user-agent strings of the form Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot{-news}/X.Y_{worker_id}; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/), and the string always contains "Qwantbot". The bot respects robots.txt rules as defined at robotstxt.org. Qwant recommends verifying it by reverse DNS lookup, with the hostname ending in qwant.com, or by matching request IPs against a published JSON file of IP ranges that is refreshed daily.
How to control Qwantbot
Target Qwantbot in your robots.txt with the Qwantbot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Qwantbot
User-agent: Qwantbot
Allow: /Block Qwantbot
User-agent: Qwantbot
Disallow: /Qwant documents two verification methods: a reverse DNS lookup confirming the hostname ends in qwant.com (with optional forward DNS confirmation), or matching against a published qwantbot.json IP range file that is refreshed daily because ranges change.
How to identify Qwantbot
Temso identifies Qwantbottraffic 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.
QwantbotQwantbot FAQ
What is Qwantbot?
Qwantbot is the crawler used by the Qwant search engine to enhance its index. Its user-agent string always contains "Qwantbot" and links to https://help.qwant.com/bot/, and a Qwantbot-news variant also exists.
How do I block Qwantbot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Qwantbot" followed by "Disallow: /" (or a narrower path); the bot respects robots.txt rules as defined at robotstxt.org. Crawling issues can also be reported to qwantbot@qwant.com.
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.
