Routing requests in industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are always restricted by QoS. Therefore, finding a high‐quality routing path is a key problem. In this paper, a clone adaptive whale optimization algorithm (CAWOA) is designed for reducing the routing energy consumption of IWSNs with QoS constraints, and a novel clone operator is proposed. More importantly, CAWOA innovatively adopts a discrete binary‐based routing coding method, which provides strong support for optimal routing schemes. In addition, a novel routing model of IWSNs combined with QoS constraints has been designed, which involves comprehensive consideration of bandwidth, delay, delay jitter, and packet loss rate. Subsequently, in a series of simulations, the proposed algorithm is compared with other heuristic‐based routing algorithms, namely, whale optimization algorithm (WOA), simulated annealing (SA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and genetic algorithm (GA). The simulation results suggest that the CAWOA‐based routing algorithm outperforms other methods in terms of routing energy consumption, convergence speed, and optimization ability. Compared with GA, SA, PSO, and WOA under the conditions that the number of nodes is 120, the maximum delay is 120 ms, the maximum delay jitter is 25 ms, the maximum bandwidth is 9 Mbps, and the packet loss rate is 0.02; the energy consumption of CAWOA‐based routing is reduced by 12%, 17%, 19%, and 7%, respectively.