Published on 2025-08-07T06:18:08Z

YandexFavicons bot

The YandexFavicons bot is a specialized, low-frequency web crawler from the Russian search engine Yandex. Its sole purpose is to discover and retrieve website favicons. These small icons are then displayed next to a site's listing in Yandex search results and other services, which can increase brand recognition and click-through rates for website owners.

What is the YandexFavicons bot?

The YandexFavicons bot is a dedicated crawler from Yandex that is designed specifically to discover, retrieve, and index favicon images from websites. It identifies itself with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexFavicons/1.0; +http://yandex.com/bots). The bot's crawling patterns are distinctive; it makes targeted requests to common favicon locations (like /favicon.ico) and has a low crawl frequency, as it mainly revisits sites only when a favicon change is detected.

Why is the YandexFavicons bot crawling my site?

The YandexFavicons bot is visiting your site to locate and index your favicon for display in Yandex's search results and other services. This helps create a more visually recognizable experience for users. The bot looks for favicon files in standard locations, such as the root directory and in HTML link tags. This is a legitimate and authorized activity for a search engine that displays favicons in its results.

What is the purpose of the YandexFavicons bot?

The purpose of the YandexFavicons bot is to support the Yandex search ecosystem by enabling visual brand elements to appear in their services. This enhances the user experience by providing visual cues that help users quickly identify familiar websites. For website owners, this provides value by increasing brand recognition and potentially improving click-through rates from Yandex search results, as listings with favicons tend to have higher engagement.

How do I block the YandexFavicons bot?

To prevent the YandexFavicons bot from accessing your site's favicon, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This may result in no favicon being displayed for your site in Yandex services.

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

User-agent: YandexFavicons
Disallow: /

How to verify the authenticity of the user-agent operated by Yandex?

Reverse IP lookup technique

To verify user-agent authenticity, you can use host linux command two times with the IP address of the requester.
  1. > host IPAddressOfRequest
    This command returns the reverse lookup hostname (e.g., 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa.). 
  2. > host ReverseDNSFromTheOutputOfFirstRequest
If the output matches the original IP address and the domain is associated with a trusted operator (e.g., Yandex), the user-agent can be considered legitimate.

IP list lookup technique

Some operators provide a public list of IP addresses used by their crawlers. This list can be cross-referenced to verify a user-agent's authenticity. However, both operators and website owners may find it challenging to maintain an up-to-date list, so use this method with caution and in conjunction with other verification techniques.