YandexScreenshotBot

YandexScreenshotBot is a web crawler from Yandex that is designed to capture visual snapshots of web pages for use as thumbnail previews in its search results. The bot identifies itself in server logs with a user-agent string like Mozilla/5.0 (...) YandexScreenshotBot/3.0; (...). It uses a Chromium-based rendering engine to fully execute JavaScript and render CSS, ensuring that the screenshots accurately represent how a page appears to a user. It is more resource-intensive than a text-only crawler.

YandexScreenshotBot is crawling your site to create visual snapshots for its search result previews. The frequency of visits depends on factors like your site's popularity and content update schedule. Websites targeting Russian-speaking audiences are likely to see more frequent visits. This is an authorized and standard activity for a search engine that provides visual previews.

The purpose of YandexScreenshotBot is to generate the thumbnail images that appear alongside search results, which provides users with a visual preview of a website before they click. This can improve the user experience and help users quickly identify relevant content. For website owners, an attractive preview can increase click-through rates from Yandex users. The bot also helps with quality assurance for Yandex's ad network and can be used to detect duplicate content.

To prevent YandexScreenshotBot from taking screenshots of your site, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This may result in no visual preview for your site in Yandex's search results.

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

User-agent: YandexScreenshotBot
Disallow: /