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IbouBot

IbouBot is the crawler of the Ibou Search Engine.
BabbarIbouBot
Search Engine Crawler

What is IbouBot?

IbouBot is Babbar's crawler for the Ibou Search Engine. It follows URLs found on public pages and adds retrieved content to Ibou's own crawl, index, and ranking pipeline. Ibou says its answers cite their sources and link readers back to the publishers it indexed.

The crawler may revisit redirects and missing pages to check whether the response was temporary. A nofollow link can still lead to a crawl because that attribute concerns link treatment, not access. Use robots.txt when the URL itself should not be fetched.

Ibou's current documentation sets a five-second delay between requests to the same host and a shorter delay when one domain uses multiple IPs. It describes a worst-case ceiling of about 0.4 requests per second, or roughly 24 requests per minute for a domain, and also supports a longer Crawl-delay rule.

The index can affect AI-style answers because Ibou explicitly says every answer cites and links to sources. The operator also explicitly says crawled data is not used to train AI models. This is documented search-time retrieval, not an inferred training pipeline.

Relevant for AI search

Is IbouBot relevant for AI search?

Yes. IbouBot collects pages for an AI product, so what it can crawl influences how AI systems describe your brand.

IbouBot feeds a search index that also powers that engine's AI answer features and overviews. One crawl can serve a classic results page and a generated summary, so blocking it costs you both the rankings you would expect and a growing share of AI answers built on the same index.

How to handle IbouBot

Allow IbouBot on pages that should be discoverable and citable in Ibou. If the crawl is useful but too frequent for the host, set a longer Crawl-delay rather than excluding the content completely.

To block the crawler, use its stable token:

User-agent: IbouBot
Disallow: /

Ibou's current bot page says it follows disallow rules and crawl delays. Verify genuine requests with forward-confirmed reverse DNS ending in ibou.io or the operator's current JSON IP ranges, then compare observed behavior with the published limits.

Examples

  • A specialist article crawled by IbouBot later appears as a linked source in an Ibou answer, sending the reader back to the publisher.
  • An operations team sees IbouBot approach the documented request ceiling on a small host and adds a longer crawl delay for that crawler.

Frequently asked questions about IbouBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

They can enter Ibou's search index and ranking pipeline, where they may become linked sources in answers returned to users.

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