What is AdsBot-Google?
AdsBot-Google is the crawler Google Ads uses to check the quality of web pages used as ad landing pages. It is one of Google's special-case crawlers.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Checks the quality of ad landing pages for Google Ads.
- robots.txt token
AdsBot-Google- Example user agent
AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)- How to verify
- Run a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP and check that the name ends in google.com (Google uses rate-limited-proxy-….google.com for special-case crawlers), then run a forward lookup on that name and confirm it returns the same IP. Or check the IP against Google's special-case crawler ranges.
- Reverse DNS
- google.com
- Operator documentation
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-special-case-crawlers
- Last verified
How often is AdsBot-Google impersonated?
For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be AdsBot-Google failed verification.
Measured between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.
This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.
Have a request that claims to be AdsBot-Google? Check its IP address.
Should you block AdsBot-Google?
- Allow it if
- you run Google Ads that point to this site.
- Block it if
- you do not advertise with Google. Remember that User-agent: * does not cover it.
- What blocking changes
- Google Ads can no longer check your landing pages, which can affect ads that point to them.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Google says AdsBot ignores the global User-agent: * group. A rule only applies if it names AdsBot-Google.
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be AdsBot-Google. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
- Google-CloudVertexBot (Google): Crawls sites whose owners asked for it when building Vertex AI Agents.
- Google-Extended (Google): A robots.txt token that controls Gemini training and grounding use.
- Google-InspectionTool (Google): Fetches pages for Search Console URL inspection and the Rich Results Test.
- Googlebot-Image (Google): Crawls images for Google Images and image features in Search.
- Googlebot-News (Google): Controls whether your pages appear in Google News.
- Googlebot-Video (Google): Crawls video for the video features of Google Search.
See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.
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