Kimi-SearchBot: what it is and how to block or allow it

What Kimi-SearchBot does

Kimi-SearchBot crawls and analyzes pages for relevance to build the index behind the search features of Kimi, Moonshot AI's assistant. Opting out of training is separate and uses the KimiBot name.

Does Kimi-SearchBot follow robots.txt?

Yes. Kimi says it uses the standard robots.txt rules for its crawlers, and that disallowing Kimi-SearchBot keeps your site out of Kimi search results.

How to block or allow Kimi-SearchBot

Block it from the whole site:

User-agent: Kimi-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Keep it out of one folder only:

User-agent: Kimi-SearchBot
Disallow: /private/

A crawler that finds a group with its own name follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. If your * group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines in the Kimi-SearchBot group. robots.txt works per host, so add the rules to each subdomain you want covered.

Test the result with the robots.txt checker, or write a new file with the robots.txt generator.

What blocking Kimi-SearchBot changes

Your site stops appearing in Kimi's search results.

Where to see Kimi-SearchBot visits

Most bots never appear in Google Analytics. Many don't run JavaScript, so the analytics tag never loads, and Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders. Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent, so search them for the bot's name.

OneLence AI visibility shows which pages AI crawlers read and fetch for answers, next to the visitors AI assistants send you and the ones that convert.

Other bots from Moonshot AI

• Kimi-User: Kimi-User fetches pages when someone using Kimi, Moonshot AI's assistant, asks for something that needs live web content. robots.txt may not fully apply to it.