GoogleOther user agent
Operated by Google
GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler used by product teams for one-off crawls and internal research and development.
The GoogleOther bot at a glance
- GoogleOther is operated by Google and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models, and fetches pages to power a specific product feature.
- The robots.txt token for GoogleOther is GoogleOther.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- GoogleOther robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther fetches public content for Google teams outside Search, such as research and development crawls.
Blocking GoogleOther does not affect Google Search rankings.
Should you block GoogleOther?
Blocking GoogleOther is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow GoogleOther
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token GoogleOther is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep GoogleOther out of private areas only
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to GoogleOther
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(GoogleOther)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to GoogleOther
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (GoogleOther) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "GoogleOther")How to verify real GoogleOther traffic
Google publishes the IP ranges that GoogleOther uses. A request with the GoogleOther user agent from an IP outside that list is an impersonator.
Official GoogleOther IP list (JSON)
Reverse DNS check: look up the request IP, confirm the hostname ends in googlebot.com, then look up that hostname and confirm it returns the same IP.
# 1. Reverse lookup: the hostname must end in googlebot.com
host REQUEST_IP
# 2. Forward lookup: must return the same REQUEST_IP
host HOSTNAME_FROM_STEP_1How to find GoogleOther in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts GoogleOther requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "GoogleOther" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
GoogleOther user agent string
The full user agent Google publishes for GoogleOther. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36GoogleOther FAQ
GoogleOther identifies itself with the robots.txt token "GoogleOther". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Yes. Google states that GoogleOther follows robots.txt rules written for the "GoogleOther" token.
Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: GoogleOther" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Yes. Google publishes the IP ranges GoogleOther uses. Check the request IP against that list; a matching user agent from any other IP is an impersonator.
Search your server access log for "GoogleOther", for example with: grep -i "GoogleOther" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Google crawler documentation. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
