Toutiao is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Bytedance.
Toutiao is ByteDance's automated news aggregation bot collecting content across web platforms.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Sample user agent strings sent by Toutiao:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; https://zhanzhang.toutiao.com/)Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Bytespider; https://zhanzhang.toutiao.com/) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; https://zhanzhang.toutiao.com/)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of Toutiao requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| China | 99% |
| China Mobile AS9808 | 84% |
| Chinanet AS4134 | 9% |
| CHINA UNICOM China169 Backbone AS4837 | 6% |
Genuine Toutiao IPs resolve to hostnames ending in bytedance.com. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP, then a forward lookup on the hostname, and check both match:
host 203.0.113.10 # the IP from your logs host crawl-name.bytedance.com # must return the same IP
We have not confirmed whether Toutiao follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /
User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Bytespider Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Bytespider Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Bytespider group, Toutiao ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Bytespider from Toutiao's user agent; check Bytedance's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Toutiao brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake Toutiao requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep Toutiao allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersToutiao indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Toutiao on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Toutiao by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Toutiao is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Bytedance. Toutiao is ByteDance's automated news aggregation bot collecting content across web platforms.
We have not confirmed whether Toutiao follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: Bytespider" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "zhanzhang.toutiao.com" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Toutiao may not follow it, and anyone can send Toutiao's user agent, so a fake Toutiao ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. Genuine Toutiao IPs resolve to a hostname ending in bytedance.com, and a forward lookup of that hostname returns the same IP. Anything else using its user agent is an impersonator.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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