What is Googlebot?

How often is Googlebot impersonated?

For the median organisation, 10% of requests claiming to be Googlebot 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 5%: 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 Googlebot? Check its IP address.

Should you block Googlebot?

Allow it if

you want to appear in Google Search. This is nearly every public site.

Block it if

a section should never appear in Google, such as internal search results. Block the path, not the crawler.

What blocking changes

Your pages drop out of Google Search and the other products Googlebot feeds. For almost every public site that is not the goal.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

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