PetalBot

search-engine PetalBot

Petal search engine web crawler bot

About this crawler

PetalBot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern PetalBot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block PetalBot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

5.3%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: PetalBot
2026-05-012026-06-046.6%

Technical details

Name
PetalBot
Pattern
PetalBot
Tags
search-engine
Reference
https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot
Added
2021/06/07
rDNS suffixes
.aspiegel.com, .huawei.com, .petalsearch.com, .petalsearch.net
Instances
2 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely PetalBot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow PetalBot:

User-agent: PetalBot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} PetalBot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "PetalBot") { return 403; }
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