robots.txt rules
Copy the group you need into the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Keep only one option per bot.
At a glance
| Detail | MistralAI-User |
|---|---|
| Operator | Mistral AI |
| Type | User triggered fetcher |
| What it does | Fetches pages when users of Mistral's Le Chat ask for current web content. |
| robots.txt token | MistralAI-User |
| Example user agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MistralAI-User/1.0; +https://docs.mistral.ai/robots) |
| Follows robots.txt | Mistral says MistralAI-User governs which sites user requests can be made to, through robots.txt. |
| How to verify | Check against the IP ranges Mistral publishes in its crawler documentation. |
| If you block it | Le Chat cannot read your pages when users ask about them. |
| Source | Mistral crawler documentation (docs.mistral.ai/robots) |
User agent version numbers change over time. Match on the token, not the full string.
What MistralAI-User does
MistralAI-User makes requests on behalf of people using Le Chat, for example to read a page with current information and cite it. Mistral says it is not used for automatic crawling or to collect training data. Mistral lists separate tokens for indexing and training.
Should you allow or block it?
Allow it if you want to be visible in Le Chat, especially in Europe.
If you block it: Le Chat cannot read your pages when users ask about them.
- Training crawlers decide whether your content helps build future models. Blocking them does not remove you from AI search today.
- Search crawlers decide whether AI engines can find and cite your pages. Blocking them usually costs visibility.
- User triggered fetchers read a page because a person asked. Blocking them stops the AI reading you at the moment someone is interested.
How to find MistralAI-User in your logs
Search your server or CDN access logs for the token MistralAI-User. This command counts visits by IP, path and status code in a standard access log:
grep -i "MistralAI-User" access.log | awk '{print $1, $7, $9}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
A run of 403 or 503 status codes means your firewall or bot protection is blocking it, even if robots.txt allows it. That is one of the most common hidden reasons sites lose AI visibility.
How to tell if a visit is genuine
Anyone can put MistralAI-User in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Check against the IP ranges Mistral publishes in its crawler documentation.