What is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is a generic Google crawler. Google says its product teams may use it to fetch publicly accessible content from sites, for example in one-off crawls for internal research and development. Rules addressed to GoogleOther do not affect any specific Google product.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Fetches public pages for Google product teams, for example for research crawls.
- robots.txt token
GoogleOther- Example user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36- 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/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
- Last verified
How often is GoogleOther impersonated?
We have not measured requests claiming to be GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther? Check its IP address.
Should you block GoogleOther?
- Allow it if
- the crawl load is not a concern.
- Block it if
- you do not want Google's research and development crawls on your site. A rule for GoogleOther does not change how Googlebot crawls.
- What blocking changes
- GoogleOther stops fetching your pages. Google says rules addressed to GoogleOther do not affect any specific product.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically.
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be GoogleOther. 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