Alibaba · Other AI
TongyiBot
Two questions hide inside this token and only one of them can be settled from primary sources. The branding question settles cleanly: Alibaba's own Tongyi Lab site presents 通义 as an umbrella laboratory brand, and its page metadata enumerates the family as "通义千问qwen、通义万相wan、通义百聆fun": Tongyi Qianwen *is* Qwen, a Chinese-market family name for the same lineage the international model name covers. The crawler question does not settle: Alibaba names neither `TongyiBot` nor `QwenBot` anywhere, so the reasonable reading (one fleet, two labels, the Tongyi one older) is an inference from the brand hierarchy and is offered here as exactly that. One correction worth carrying, because the opposite is often assumed: the Tongyi domain is not retired, its root still serves 通义实验室 as a live model portfolio, and only sub-paths such as `/bot` redirect away.
- Operated by
- Alibaba
- Purpose
- Other AI
- robots.txt token
- TongyiBot
- Verification
- User agent only
AI-adjacent traffic that does not fit the three purposes above.
How to verify TongyiBot
Alibaba publishes no list of IP addresses for TongyiBot, so nobody (us included) can prove that a request carrying this user agent really came from Alibaba. The name is trivial to copy. Treat it as a claim the visitor is making about itself, not as an identity anyone has checked.
There is no range list to confirm. This entry was last reviewed against Alibaba's own documentation on .
User agent
Alibaba has not published a full user-agent string for TongyiBot. Requests are identified by the TongyiBot product token appearing in the User-Agent header; we match that token rather than a whole string, because the rest of the header varies and matching it would miss real traffic.
robots.txt for TongyiBot
Block
User-agent: TongyiBot
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: TongyiBot
Allow: /robots.txt is a request, not an enforcement mechanism. It is honoured by convention, and a crawler that ignores it is stopped at your edge, not in a text file.
What blocking TongyiBot costs you
Both branches of that inference land in the same place, which is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly. If this is the `QwenBot` fleet under its legacy label, the cost is the training-corpus cost described on that page and you would be disallowing both strings in the same block anyway; if it is a stale token still in rotation from before the rename, blocking it costs nothing at all. No vendor source ties this name to an answer box, a citation, a link preview or an index, so there is no surface any reader can be told they are giving up.
Vendor documentation
Alibaba does not publish documentation for TongyiBot that we could find. Everything on this page comes from what they do publish elsewhere and from observed behaviour, so treat it accordingly.