Google-Read-Aloud: what it is and how to block or allow it

What Google-Read-Aloud does

Google-Read-Aloud fetches a web page and reads it out with text-to-speech when a user asks. Google lists Google Go, Google Read it and Read Aloud in the Google app as products that use it. It isn't a crawler and doesn't follow links.

• It renders pages without the user's cookies. For paywalled pages, Google points to subscription structured data with isAccessibleForFree set to false. Source
• Its former name, google-speakr, is retired. Source

Does Google-Read-Aloud follow robots.txt?

No. Google says that because Read Aloud is user-triggered, you can't opt out with robots.txt.

It doesn't honor Crawl-delay.

How to stop Google-Read-Aloud

Add the meta tag <meta name="google" content="nopagereadaloud"> to the page. Google may fetch the page once more to see the tag, then its requests should stop.

What blocking Google-Read-Aloud changes

With the nopagereadaloud tag, Google stops reading your page aloud to people who use its text-to-speech features.

Where to see Google-Read-Aloud visits

Most bots never appear in Google Analytics. Many don't run JavaScript, so the analytics tag never loads, and Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders. Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent, so search them for the bot's name.

OneLence AI visibility shows which pages AI crawlers read and fetch for answers, next to the visitors AI assistants send you and the ones that convert.

Other bots from Google

• Google-Extended: Not a crawler: the robots.txt setting for Gemini training and grounding. It doesn't affect Google Search.
• Googlebot: Googlebot is Google Search's crawler. Its crawl also decides whether your pages can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, so blocking it takes you out of both.
• Google-InspectionTool: Google-InspectionTool fetches your page when someone runs one of Google's Search testing tools, such as the Rich Results Test or URL Inspection in Search Console.
• Storebot-Google: Storebot-Google is Google's shopping crawler. It fetches pages for Google Shopping surfaces such as the Shopping tab in Search.
• GoogleOther: GoogleOther is a general-purpose Google crawler that product teams use for jobs outside Search, such as research crawls. Blocking it doesn't affect Google Search.
• Google-Agent: Google-Agent is the name AI agents running on Google's infrastructure use when they browse sites and take actions because a user asked them to.
• Google-GeminiNotebook: Google-GeminiNotebook fetches a page when a Gemini Notebook user adds it as a source. It replaced the NotebookLM fetcher in July 2026.
• AdsBot-Google: AdsBot-Google checks the quality of Google Ads landing pages. It ignores the User-agent: * group, so it has to be named to be blocked, and blocking it can get your ads disapproved.
• Mediapartners-Google: Mediapartners-Google is the AdSense crawler. It reads pages that carry Google ad tags to pick relevant ads, and it ignores the User-agent: * group.