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Qwen user agents, explained.

Alibaba's Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) powers multimodal AI across Taobao, Tmall, and Alibaba Cloud. Three crawlers feed it — here's how each one works.

Qwen · AlibabaUpdated Apr 2026~7 min read3 user agents
TL;DR

Alibaba uses QwenBot and TongyiBot for Tongyi Qianwen, plus AliyunBot across Alibaba Cloud. Qwen's e-commerce integration (Taobao, Tmall) makes it critical for anyone selling into China.

Overview

Qwen (通义千问, Tongyi Qianwen) is Alibaba's multimodal LLM. 40M+ monthly active users, ~12% of the Chinese LLM market, and deep integration with Alibaba's e-commerce ecosystem — Taobao, Tmall, and AliExpress all run Qwen-powered features.

Qwen also ships open-weight versions (Qwen-72B, 14B, 7B) on Hugging Face, making it popular with developers.

How to identify the agents

3 crawlers

Qwen identifies itself with specific user-agent strings. Verify each through a published IP range.

QB

QwenBot

Qwen AI · primary crawler
TrainingAnswers
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; QwenBot/1.0; +https://tongyi.aliyun.com/bot)

Alibaba's primary Qwen crawler. Feeds Tongyi Qianwen's knowledge base and powers answers across Alibaba surfaces.

Verifiabletongyi.aliyun.com/bot
TB

TongyiBot

Tongyi assistant crawler
Assistant
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TongyiBot/1.0; +https://tongyi.aliyun.com)

Chinese-name identifier used alongside QwenBot. Appears in logs targeting the tongyi.aliyun.com assistant.

Verifiabletongyi.aliyun.com
AB

AliyunBot

Alibaba Cloud crawler
Cloud services
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AliyunBot/1.0; +https://www.aliyun.com)

Broader Alibaba Cloud crawler used across DashScope, enterprise APIs, and B2B services that embed Qwen.

Verifiablealiyun.com

How Qwen accesses your content

3 access patterns, mapped to the agents above.

1

AI answers

QwenBot / TongyiBot fetch content for Qwen's generated responses.
2

E-commerce

Powers product recommendations, reviews, and shopping answers across Taobao, Tmall, and AliExpress.
3

Cloud B2B

AliyunBot feeds Alibaba Cloud's enterprise AI services.

Control Qwen's access

robots.txt

You control each agent independently. Common configurations below.

Allow Qwen crawlingRecommended

Standard setup for visibility in Alibaba AI surfaces.
# Allow Alibaba Qwen User-agent: QwenBot Allow: / User-agent: TongyiBot Allow: / User-agent: AliyunBot Allow: /

Block all Qwen/Alibaba crawlersRestrictive

Removes you from Qwen answers AND Alibaba Cloud AI.
# Block every Qwen crawler User-agent: QwenBot Disallow: / User-agent: TongyiBot Disallow: / User-agent: AliyunBot Disallow: /

E-commerce only

Expose product pages to Qwen, block the rest.
# Product-focused access User-agent: QwenBot User-agent: TongyiBot Disallow: /admin/ Disallow: /checkout/ Disallow: /user/ Allow: /products/ Allow: /catalog/ Allow: /reviews/

Optimize content for Qwen.

Qwen leans e-commerce and multimodal. Five things that lift your citations across Alibaba's ecosystem.

Product schema first. Use Product, Offer, and Review structured data — Qwen powers Alibaba's shopping AI.
Describe images. Qwen is multimodal (Qwen-VL). Alt text, captions, and filenames feed visual understanding.
Simplified Chinese support. Target China? Provide zh-CN versions with RMB pricing and local payment methods.
Mobile-first. Chinese traffic is mobile-dominant. Layouts that break on small screens lose signals.
Integrate WeChat / Weibo. Social proof in the Chinese ecosystem reinforces Qwen's authority signals.

Track Qwen visits with xSeek.

Track every Qwen crawler visit.

Monitor QwenBot, TongyiBot, and AliyunBot separately. Understand how your products and content flow into Alibaba AI surfaces.

Start free →

Frequently asked questions

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; QwenBot/1.0; +https://tongyi.aliyun.com/bot). Alibaba also uses TongyiBot and AliyunBot.
Source: Alibaba's Tongyi bot page and DashScope platform docs.
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