What is Googlebot-News?
Googlebot-News is the robots.txt token for Google News. It has no user-agent string of its own: Google crawls for News with its Googlebot user-agent strings. Google says rules addressed to Googlebot-News affect the Google News product, including news.google.com and the Google News app.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Controls whether your pages appear in Google News.
- robots.txt token
Googlebot-News- How to verify
- No request carries Googlebot-News as its user agent. The crawl comes from Googlebot, so verify it as Googlebot: run a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP, check that the name ends in 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.
- Reverse DNS
- googlebot.com
- Operator documentation
- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
- Last verified
How often is Googlebot-News impersonated?
We have not measured requests claiming to be Googlebot-News yet, so we show no share.
This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 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-News? Check its IP address.
Should you block Googlebot-News?
- Allow it if
- you want your pages in Google News.
- Block it if
- you want to stay out of Google News. Address the rule to Googlebot-News, not to Googlebot, to keep it apart from Google Search.
- What blocking changes
- Google says that blocking Googlebot-News in robots.txt prevents your site from appearing in Google News.
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-News
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Googlebot-News. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
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- 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-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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