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Yahoo! Slurp

Yahoo! Slurp is the web crawler (robot) used by Yahoo! Search to discover and index web pages for its search engine.
Yahoo
Search Engine Crawler

What is Yahoo! Slurp?

Yahoo! Slurp crawls and indexes web page information for Yahoo Search. Yahoo identifies it by the Slurp product token, while access logs usually show that token inside a longer browser-style user agent.

Yahoo notes that some of its search results come from partners. Its own Slurp help page still tells site owners to allow Slurp if they want pages considered for Yahoo Mobile Search. Blocking the bot therefore has a specific Yahoo search consequence, but it should not be described as removing a site from every result Yahoo serves.

The documented full user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp). Cloudflare's bot directory records a variant with an extra sieve-gq1 suffix. Rules and log filters should match Slurp rather than depend on that trailing build text.

Slurp follows the Robots Exclusion Standard. Yahoo says it uses the first robots record whose user-agent value contains Slurp; if none exists, it falls back to the first wildcard record. The crawler also supports a crawl-delay directive for sites that need fewer requests.

This is a conventional search indexing crawler. Neither the supplied record nor Yahoo's crawler documentation assigns Slurp a role in generative answers or model training. A Slurp visit shows that Yahoo Search is fetching a page, not that the page has entered an AI training corpus.

Cloudflare's directory describes Slurp in the past tense and links to an older Yahoo help URL, while Yahoo's live help center continues to document the crawler and its mobile search use. The Cloudflare record supplies no signature key directory, and this entry has no verified IP range. A matching user agent is useful for classification but cannot prove that Yahoo sent the request.

Relevant for AI search

Is Yahoo! Slurp relevant for AI search?

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

Yahoo! Slurp 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 Yahoo! Slurp

Allow Slurp on public pages when Yahoo Mobile Search matters to the site. If only expensive or unhelpful sections are causing load, exclude those paths instead of dropping the crawler everywhere.

Yahoo's stable robots.txt token is Slurp:

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /

Place a Slurp-specific record before a broad wildcard record so the intended rule is the first matching entry. A crawl-delay can reduce request frequency without removing pages from the crawl entirely.

Robots.txt is a crawl preference, not access control. Keep private pages behind authentication, and retain ordinary rate limits for clients that claim the Slurp name. There is no supplied IP or signature mechanism for authenticating them.

Examples

  • A local publisher leaves Slurp access open on its news archive because it wants those pages eligible for Yahoo Mobile Search.
  • A large forum disallows `/members/` for Slurp and adds a crawl delay, while keeping public discussions available for indexing.
  • An administrator matches the `Slurp` token even though a request carries the longer Cloudflare example with a `sieve-gq1` suffix.

Frequently asked questions about Yahoo! Slurp

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

Slurp collects web page information for Yahoo Search. Yahoo specifically connects access by this crawler with eligibility for Yahoo Mobile Search.

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