Slurp in robots.txt
Slurp is Yahoo's crawler. Here's exactly what it does, whether it respects robots.txt, and the rules to control it. To apply a policy in one click, use the AI Crawler Manager.
What Slurp is
Slurp is Yahoo's historical search crawler. Yahoo Search is now largely powered by Bing, so Slurp's role is far smaller than it once was, but it still appears in logs and can be controlled in robots.txt.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| User-agent | Slurp |
| Operator | Yahoo |
| Category | Search engines |
| Honors robots.txt | Yes |
| Affects search ranking | No |
What Slurp does
- Crawls pages for the parts of Yahoo that still use a Yahoo-operated index.
- Appears in server logs even though most Yahoo Search results come from Bing.
Why site owners care
- Most Yahoo Search visibility now depends on Bingbot, not Slurp.
- Slurp is low-volume for most sites; it rarely needs special handling.
How to allow or block Slurp
Add a group targeting the Slurp user-agent. Disallow: / blocks it from your whole site; an empty Disallow: allows it.
User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /User-agent: Slurp
Disallow:No effect on search ranking
How to verify Slurp
Verify via reverse DNS to a crawl.yahoo.net host with forward confirmation.
Does it honor robots.txt?
Recommendation
Recommended: Allow
Is Yahoo Slurp still used?
Yes, but minimally. Yahoo Search results are predominantly served from Bing's index, so Bingbot matters far more than Slurp for Yahoo visibility. Slurp still shows up in some logs.
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