Naverbot

What does Naverbot do?

Yeti (Naverbot) crawls and indexes web pages to populate Naver Search, South Korea's dominant search engine. It feeds Naver's search results, link previews, and related indexing services. Pages indexed by Yeti appear in Naver Search with clickable links back to your site, making it a direct source of referral traffic, especially from Korean-speaking users.

Should I allow and optimize for Naverbot to drive organic growth?

Naver is the leading search engine in South Korea, commanding a significant share of Korean web search traffic. Allowing Yeti means your pages can appear in Naver Search results with direct clickable links. If you have any Korean-language content or serve a Korean audience, blocking Yeti cuts off a major traffic source. Even for English-language sites, Naver indexes international content and can send referral traffic from Korean users searching for global topics. Allow Yeti and register your site in Naver SearchAdvisor to maximize visibility.

Data Usage & Training

It is unclear from Naver's public documentation whether content crawled by Yeti is used for AI model training. Official documentation describes Yeti primarily as a search indexing crawler for Naver Search and related services. If this distinction matters to you, monitor Naver's documentation for updates.

How Naverbot Accesses Content

Here's how Naverbot accesses your site and understands your content:

• Fetches HTML via standard HTTP requests using the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yeti/1.1; +https://naver.me/spd)
• Respects robots.txt Disallow and Allow directives
• Supports Sitemap directives listed in robots.txt
• Multiple user-agent variants exist (Yeti/1.0, Yeti/1.1, Chrome-like wrappers)
• JavaScript rendering capability is unknown

Yeti crawls continuously on a schedule, typical of search engine crawlers. Naver SearchAdvisor also lets you request on-demand re-crawls for specific pages.

How to Block or Control Naverbot

To block Yeti via robots.txt: User-agent: Yeti Disallow: / You can also use standard meta robots tags, though Naver has not explicitly documented support for them. IP-based blocking is possible but difficult to maintain because Naver uses a large, changing set of IP addresses. No official IP range list is published. For verification, combine user-agent token checks with reverse DNS lookups on the request IP. Naver SearchAdvisor provides additional crawl controls and testing tools.

Common Issues & Troubleshooting

Watch out for these common problems when working with Naverbot:

• Multiple user-agent variants (Yeti/1.0, Yeti/1.1, Chrome-like wrappers) can make filtering inconsistent if you only match one string
• Naver's IP addresses change frequently, making IP-based blocking unreliable without regular list maintenance
• Reverse DNS validation is recommended to avoid blocking legitimate Yeti requests or allowing spoofed ones
• Crawl-delay support is not documented, so rate limiting via robots.txt may not work as expected
• Bot protection services like Cloudflare may flag Yeti requests as suspicious due to unfamiliar user-agent patterns