What is Mediapartners-Google?
Mediapartners-Google is the Google AdSense crawler. Google says it visits participating sites in order to provide them with relevant ads. Rules addressed to it affect ad products such as Google AdSense and Google Ad Manager.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Reads the pages of sites that show Google ads, so the ads match the content.
- robots.txt token
Mediapartners-Google- Example user agent
Mediapartners-Google- How to verify
- Run a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP and check that the name ends in google.com (Google uses rate-limited-proxy-….google.com for special-case crawlers), then run a forward lookup on that name and confirm it returns the same IP. Or check the IP against Google's special-case crawler ranges.
- Reverse DNS
- google.com
- Operator documentation
- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-special-case-crawlers
- Last verified
How often is Mediapartners-Google impersonated?
We have not measured requests claiming to be Mediapartners-Google 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 Mediapartners-Google? Check its IP address.
Should you block Mediapartners-Google?
- Allow it if
- you show Google AdSense or Google Ad Manager ads on this site.
- Block it if
- you show no Google ads. Remember that User-agent: * does not cover it.
- What blocking changes
- Google says that if robots.txt disallows the AdSense crawler, it cannot serve Google ads on the site.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Google says Mediapartners-Google ignores the global User-agent: * group. A rule only applies if it names Mediapartners-Google.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Mediapartners-Google. 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.
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