Guest Mode and Managed Bots¶

Bot API 9.6 and 10.0 — April and May 2026

Two changes to how a bot exists in a chat. Guest mode lets a bot answer in a group it is not a member of. Managed bots let a user create and own a bot through another bot, without going near BotFather.

Guest mode¶

Normally a bot must be added to a group before it sees anything. In guest mode a member can summon it for a single question: the bot receives that message, answers it, and stays out.

@app.on_guest_message()
async def guest(client, message):
    print(message.text, message.guest_query_id)

The update carries a guest_query_id, and that id — not a chat id — is what the answer is addressed to:

from pyrogram.types import InlineQueryResultArticle, InputTextMessageContent

@app.on_guest_message()
async def guest(client, message):
    await client.answer_guest_query(
        message.guest_query_id,
        InlineQueryResultArticle(
            title="Layer",
            input_message_content=InputTextMessageContent("Currently layer 228."),
        ),
    )

The reply is a single InlineQueryResult, the same shape an inline query takes, because the bot is producing one result rather than joining a conversation.

A guest update also carries the messages the user quoted when summoning the bot. wzgram parses those first, so the peers and messages they refer to are already known by the time your handler runs, even though the bot never saw the chat’s history.

Managed bots¶

A managed bot is one created programmatically and owned by a user. When one is created, its manager is told:

@app.on_managed_bot()
async def created(client, updated):
    print(f"{updated.user.first_name} now owns @{updated.bot.username}")

ManagedBotUpdated is deliberately small: user is the owner, bot is the bot. Everything else you do with it goes through the ordinary bot methods.

Gotchas¶

A guest message is not an ordinary message: it reaches on_guest_message() and never on_message(). Registering only the latter means seeing nothing.
guest_query_id expires. Answer inside the handler; there is no chat to come back to later.
Guest mode does not grant history. The bot sees the message it was summoned for and the messages quoted with it, nothing else.