Qwantbot

Qwantbot is the web crawler for the French search engine Qwant. It functions as a traditional search engine bot, systematically browsing the web to discover and index content for its search results. The bot identifies itself in server logs with user-agent strings like Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Qwantbot/1.0; +https://help.qwant.com/bot/). Qwantbot operates from a range of IP addresses located primarily in France and is designed to respect standard web protocols, including robots.txt directives.

Qwantbot is crawling your website to index its content for the Qwant search engine. Its goal is to make your site's content discoverable by Qwant users. The frequency of its visits depends on factors like your site's popularity and how often its content is updated. New content or changes to existing pages will often trigger a visit from the bot. This is a standard and authorized activity for a legitimate search engine crawler.

The purpose of Qwantbot is to support the Qwant search engine by building and maintaining its independent search index. Qwant positions itself as a privacy-focused alternative to other search engines, and the data collected by its bot is used exclusively to power its search results without user tracking. For website owners, being crawled by Qwantbot provides the benefit of visibility in Qwant's search results, which can drive traffic from users who prefer a privacy-respecting search engine, particularly in France and Europe.

If you wish to prevent Qwantbot from accessing your website, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will prevent your pages from appearing in Qwant search results.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Qwantbot
Disallow: /