MistralAI-Index: what this bot is and how to allow or block it
MistralAI-Index is a search bot from Mistral AI: it finds and reads pages so that Mistral Le Chat can find your site and cite it in answers. Block it and your site drops out of those answers.
MistralAI-Index User-Agent
This is how MistralAI-Index identifies itself in requests to your site. In robots.txt you only write the token — MistralAI-Index.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MistralAI-Index/1.0; +https://docs.mistral.ai/robots)
How to allow MistralAI-Index
Add this group to robots.txt at the site root. Close service sections in the same group: a bot with its own group does not read the «User-agent: *» rules.
User-agent: MistralAI-Index Allow: /
robots.txt is not everything. If your site uses Cloudflare or other bot protection, it may serve MistralAI-Index a 403 error or a challenge page even when robots.txt allows everything.
How to block MistralAI-Index
To block the whole site, add the group below to robots.txt. The rule works for bots that respect robots.txt.
User-agent: MistralAI-Index Disallow: /
What happens if you block MistralAI-Index
Mistral Le Chat will stop finding and reading your pages: your site will not appear in answers with search, and the assistant will not link to it.
How to check whether MistralAI-Index visits your site
Search the web server logs for the token. The User-Agent string is easy to fake, so to be sure, check the IP address against the ranges if Mistral AI publishes them.
grep "MistralAI-Index" /var/log/nginx/access.log
Does your site let MistralAI-Index in
Free 15-second check: we read your robots.txt and request your site as AI bots — you see which ones the server and bot protection let in and which they block.
Other Mistral Le Chat bots
MistralAI-Useron requestMistralAI-Trainingtraining
Questions and answers
Should I block MistralAI-Index?
No, if you want Mistral Le Chat to find and recommend your site. Blocking search bots only makes sense for pages that should not appear in answers.
How do I know whether MistralAI-Index visits my site?
Search the web server logs for the token. The User-Agent string is easy to fake, so to be sure, check the IP address against the ranges if Mistral AI publishes them.
Is it enough to allow MistralAI-Index in robots.txt?
robots.txt is not everything. If your site uses Cloudflare or other bot protection, it may serve MistralAI-Index a 403 error or a challenge page even when robots.txt allows everything.