---
schema_version: "newruntime-reader-dossiers-v1"
type: "reader_dossier"
slug: "petalbot"
kind: "search"
operator: "Huawei (Petal Search)"
researched_at: "2026-10-23"
confidence: "medium"
json_url: "https://newruntime.com/readers/petalbot.json"
canonical_url: "https://newruntime.com/readers/petalbot/"
---

# PetalBot

> Huawei's crawler for the Petal Search engine; directories also say it supplies content recommendations for Huawei Assistant and other Huawei AI services. It crawls mostly with a mobile user agent that looks like Chrome on Android 7.0 and names itself only at the end ('compatible; PetalBot'). Official page (webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot) is JS-only and could not be read.

## Dossier

- Kind: Search engines
- Operator: Huawei (Petal Search) (https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/)
- Documentation: none found
- robots.txt tokens: PetalBot
- Feeds: search index
- Respects robots.txt: Not documented. Third-party directories list it as robots.txt-compliant, but some report non-compliance; operator page not readable.
- Verification: Reverse DNS
- Labels matched in our logs: petalbot. Snapshots before 23 Oct 2026 cut its mobile user agent at 80 characters, before the product token, and logged it as 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (HTML, like Gecko) Mobile S…' (other bot); those history rows count here. Newer snapshots log it as PetalBot, a search crawler.

## Why it matters to New Runtime (our interpretation)

Our busiest single search crawler since 1 October, and a heavy reader of Markdown record twins. It indexes for Huawei-device users (Petal Search, Huawei Assistant), an audience we otherwise do not reach.

## Observed behaviour

- Baseline 2026-10-23 (93-day window): 5,883 requests on 24 days; first seen 2026-09-23, last seen 2026-10-23; Regular.
- Live numbers: https://newruntime.com/bot-traffic-history.json and https://newruntime.com/crawler-journeys.json

## Sources

- https://knownagents.com/agents/petalbot
- https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot
- https://chrisleverseo.com/user-agents/petalbot/

Identity: A family name is what a client claims in its user agent. It is verified only when its request came from the operator's published IP ranges or passed forward-confirmed reverse DNS, as reported per family in /crawler-journeys.json. Anyone can claim any name.

All dossiers: https://newruntime.com/readers.md