MistralAI-User
MistralAI-User is the bot Mistral AI uses to visit a web page when someone asks its assistant a question that needs it.
MistralAI-User is the bot that Mistral AI, the French AI company, uses to fetch web pages on behalf of the people using its assistant. Mistral's crawler page says it's for user actions in Vibe, its assistant: when someone asks a question, the assistant may visit a web page to help answer it and include a link to that page.
So a visit from MistralAI-User usually means a real person asked something that led the assistant to your page.
Mistral's three bots
Mistral lists three bots, each with its own job:
- MistralAI-User visits pages to answer a person's question
- MistralAI-Index crawls the web to build the index behind Mistral's search
- MistralAI-Training crawls the web to build datasets for training Mistral's models
Because each one has its own name, you can treat them differently in robots.txt. For example, you might let MistralAI-User and MistralAI-Index read your site, so Mistral's assistant can find and cite you, and block MistralAI-Training if you don't want your pages used to train its models.
How to recognise it
Its user agent contains MistralAI-User/1.0 and a link to Mistral's crawler page. Anyone can copy a bot's name, so the name alone doesn't prove the request came from Mistral.
For example, if your server logs show a burst of thousands of requests a minute calling themselves MistralAI-User, all to your product pages, that's unlikely to be people asking questions. It's more likely a scraper borrowing the name.
In AnswerOrbit
The Audit tab in Website shows each AI bot we know with its purpose and whether your robots.txt allows it. Bots marked fetching for a user read a page because someone asked an assistant to look at it. Bot visits checks each request before counting it, so a bot borrowing a known name doesn't count. See Website and AI traffic.