GoogleOther (Google): what it is and how to allow or block it
Updated · checked against the operator's documentation on
GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler that product teams can use for their own purposes. Its robots.txt token is GoogleOther.
Facts
- Operator
- Category
- Special-purpose crawler
- robots.txt token
GoogleOther
- Honors robots.txt?
- Yes, per Google. Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.
- User-agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
- User agent we logged
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; GoogleOther)Most common variant in our own logs, 3,506 requests, 19 to 25 Oct 2026. Static snapshot, not the live counter below. A logged string is a claim: anyone can send it.
- Official source
- Google: Overview of Google crawlers and fetchers
- Compared with the source
What it is used for
Google describes it as a generic crawler that various product teams can use, for example for one-off internal research and development crawls. It does not affect any specific Google product.
Not the crawler behind a search index. What blocking it changes is specific to its tool, so read the next section.
What happens if you block it
Per Google, it does not affect any specific product, so blocking it removes you from no particular Google surface; it only stops generic research and development crawls. GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video are separate crawlers not documented here.
In our own logs, a mobile GoogleOther variant was the most frequent bot user-agent string on four small sites in one week (3,506 requests, 19 to 25 Oct 2026). That is our own data, not a general statement about GoogleOther. Google's verification page names several IP range files but does not say which crawler is in which file, so check the current page rather than assuming.
Is it really GoogleOther?
Anyone can send GoogleOther as a user agent, so a log line proves nothing by itself. The way to tell is the requesting IP address.
- Compare the IP address with the Google: Verifying Googlebot (links the IP range files). A request from outside those ranges is not the operator's crawler.
- Paste any user agent from your logs into the user-agent lookup, or follow the scripts in Fake Googlebots and PHP scanners.
How to allow or block GoogleOther
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. A group that names the bot overrides a general User-agent: * group.
User-agent: GoogleOther Allow: /
User-agent: GoogleOther Disallow: /
Does your site allow GoogleOther today? The checker evaluates your robots.txt for this and every other bot.Check my site
What we see on our own sites
Live counter, last 30 days: 23 requests on 2 days identified as GoogleOther (latest: ). That is a small sample: read it as an example, not as a measurement of the web.
- Content pages: 21
- Home page: 2
Counts come from the websites we operate; they hold no IP addresses or URLs, and a user agent is only a claim. See the bot traffic data and the methodology.
Questions about GoogleOther
What is GoogleOther?
Google's generic crawler that product teams can use for their own purposes. Google describes it as a generic crawler that various product teams can use, for example for one-off internal research and development crawls. It does not affect any specific Google product.
Is GoogleOther safe and legitimate?
The real GoogleOther is a special-purpose crawler run by Google. A user-agent string is only a claim, though, so anyone can send it. Compare the requesting IP address with the published IP ranges.
Does GoogleOther obey robots.txt?
Yes, per Google. Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.
How do I block GoogleOther?
Add a group to the robots.txt at the root of your domain: User-agent: GoogleOther followed by Disallow: /. A group that names the bot overrides a general User-agent: * group.
Will blocking GoogleOther hurt my Google rankings or AI visibility?
This is not the crawler behind a search index, so blocking it is not a ranking decision. Per Google, it does not affect any specific product, so blocking it removes you from no particular Google surface; it only stops generic research and development crawls. GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video are separate crawlers not documented here.
Related bots
More from Google
- Google-Extended AI control tokenA robots.txt token that lets you manage whether Google may use crawled content for Gemini training and grounding.
- Googlebot Search engine crawlerGoogle's main crawler for Google Search, whose index Google's AI features in Search also draw on.
- Googlebot-Image Search engine crawlerGoogle's crawler for the images that appear in Google Search and related surfaces.
- Google-CloudVertexBot AI user-triggered fetcherGoogle Cloud's crawler that fetches pages when a site owner asks to build a Vertex AI agent.
Other Special-purpose crawlers
- archive.org_bot Internet ArchiveReported to be the crawler the Internet Archive uses for Wayback Machine and Archive-It captures.
- WebMCPIndexBot WebMCP ShieldA survey crawler that measures how widely websites adopt WebMCP.
- AgentTrustBot agenttru.stA crawler that looks for published AI agent discovery documents on newly seen hostnames.
All Special-Purpose Crawlers · Bot directory · Bots from Google · Which bots to allow or block · robots.txt generator · See a page as a bot