What is Google-CloudVertexBot?
Google-CloudVertexBot crawls a site when its owner requests it while building Vertex AI Agents. Google says it has no effect on Google Search or other products.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Crawls sites whose owners asked for it when building Vertex AI Agents.
- robots.txt token
Google-CloudVertexBot- How to verify
- Run a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP and check that the name ends in googlebot.com (Google uses crawl-….googlebot.com and geo-crawl-….geo.googlebot.com), then run a forward lookup on that name and confirm it returns the same IP. Or check the IP against Google's common crawler ranges. A googleusercontent.com name does not count: any Google Cloud virtual machine can have one.
- Reverse DNS
- googlebot.com
- Operator documentation
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- Last verified
How often is Google-CloudVertexBot impersonated?
For the median organisation, 100% of requests claiming to be Google-CloudVertexBot 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 over 99%: 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 Google-CloudVertexBot? Check its IP address.
Should you block Google-CloudVertexBot?
- Allow it if
- your organization builds Vertex AI Agents on this site's content.
- Block it if
- nobody in your organization requested these crawls. Verify unrequested traffic with this name before you decide.
- What blocking changes
- Vertex AI Agents that you or your team set up can no longer crawl the site. Search is unaffected.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically.
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Google-CloudVertexBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
- AdsBot-Google (Google): Checks the quality of ad landing pages for Google Ads.
- 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.
Request a site audit