What is Googlebot-Video?

Googlebot-Video is Google's crawler for video. Google says rules addressed to Googlebot-Video affect video-related Google Search features and other products that depend on videos.

Operator: Google
Purpose: Crawls video for the video features of Google Search.
robots.txt token: Googlebot-Video
Example user agent: Googlebot-Video/1.0
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
IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
Operator documentation: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
Last verified: 2026-10-10

How often is Googlebot-Video impersonated?

We have not measured requests claiming to be Googlebot-Video 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-Video? Check its IP address.

Should you block Googlebot-Video?

Allow it if: you publish video and want it in Google's video results.
Block it if: you do not want your videos in Google's video features.
What blocking changes: Your videos can drop out of the video features of Google Search and of other Google products that depend on videos.

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-Video
Disallow: /

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

Related bots

AdsBot-Google (Google): Checks the quality of ad landing pages for Google Ads.
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.

See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.

Request a site audit