What is Google-InspectionTool?

How often is Google-InspectionTool impersonated?

For the median organisation, 99% of requests claiming to be Google-InspectionTool 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 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-InspectionTool? Check its IP address.

Should you block Google-InspectionTool?

Allow it if

your team uses Search Console or Google's testing tools.

Block it if

you never use Google's testing tools. In our data most requests with this name fail verification, so verify before you decide.

What blocking changes

Search Console's URL inspection and the Rich Results Test can no longer fetch your pages. Search itself 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-InspectionTool
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Google-InspectionTool. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.