ByteDance · Other AI
Doubaobot
Doubao (豆包) is by user count among the largest consumer AI assistants in China, which makes the documentation vacuum around its crawler far more conspicuous than the same silence around the smaller names. Three places such a document would plausibly live all come back empty: `doubao.com` itself, where `/bot` and `/crawler` fall through to the app shell; Volcengine, the ByteDance cloud arm that commercialises the Doubao models and hosts their developer documentation; and the Toutiao webmaster platform, whose crawler coverage begins and ends with Bytespider. So whether Doubao retrieves live pages to answer a question, whether it collects training data, and whether those are even the same agent are all unestablished. A `doubao.com/robots.txt` does exist, but it governs ByteDance's own site: it is evidence about what Doubao publishes, not about how Doubao crawls, and must not be read as crawler policy.
- Operated by
- ByteDance
- Purpose
- Other AI
- robots.txt token
- Doubaobot
- Verification
- User agent only
AI-adjacent traffic that does not fit the three purposes above.
How to verify Doubaobot
ByteDance publishes no list of IP addresses for Doubaobot, so nobody (us included) can prove that a request carrying this user agent really came from ByteDance. 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 ByteDance's own documentation on .
User agent
ByteDance has not published a full user-agent string for Doubaobot. Requests are identified by the Doubaobot 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 Doubaobot
Block
User-agent: Doubaobot
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: Doubaobot
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 Doubaobot costs you
This is the entry where the market split is sharpest, so it is worth stating without hedging. Doubao's user base is overwhelmingly domestic Chinese, and a publisher whose readers sit in North America or Europe can disallow this token and forfeit nothing measurable: no referral stream, no ranking, no preview. A publisher deliberately reaching Chinese-language consumers is in the opposite position and may be removing itself from answers on one of that market's highest-traffic assistants, while still choosing blind, because ByteDance publishes no statement that allowing the token yields citations, links or any traffic back at all. Either way enforcement runs on the honour system: no ranges, no signature scheme and no hostname guarantee exist for this name (the one ByteDance publishes covers Bytespider only), so a disallow binds only traffic that identifies itself truthfully.
Vendor documentation
ByteDance does not publish documentation for Doubaobot that we could find. Everything on this page comes from what they do publish elsewhere and from observed behaviour, so treat it accordingly.