The IP address check tells you whether an IPv4 address belongs to Yandex. It is the quick counterpart to a manual reverse DNS lookup.
The three results, and their different meanings
- Belongs to the Yandex indexing bot. These requests may be crawling your site.
- Belongs to Yandex. Yandex address space, but possibly unrelated to search indexing — another service entirely.
- Does not belong to Yandex. Investigate the source of the requests.
The distinction between the first two is the point of the tool. Traffic from Yandex address space is not evidence of crawling, and treating it as such leads to wrong conclusions about indexing.
The caveat that matters for allowlisting
Addresses leased by Yandex — Yandex Cloud, for example — may be identified as Yandex addresses without actually belonging to Yandex. Anyone can rent them. An allowlist built on “is it a Yandex IP” therefore admits anything hosted on their cloud, which is precisely the wrong security posture.
Why the DNS method remains the standard
Yandex does not publish its robot IP ranges — they change frequently across three autonomous systems — so the supported verification is reverse DNS plus a forward confirmation. This tool answers a single address quickly; the DNS procedure is what belongs in automated log analysis.
When to reach for it
When a log shows heavy traffic claiming to be Yandex, when deciding whether a blocked request was legitimate, and when a client’s security team proposes blocking an address range. It settles the question in seconds and prevents the two errors that follow — blocking the real indexer, or trusting a forgery.
Comment nous l'appliquons
We use this when a client’s operations team is about to block a range, because the cost of blocking the real indexer is weeks of lost crawling. The leased-address caveat is the one worth repeating: a Yandex Cloud address will look like Yandex, so an allowlist built on that check is not a control at all.
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