GoogleOther: what it is and how to block or allow it

What GoogleOther does

GoogleOther is a general-purpose crawler that Google's product teams may use to fetch public content, for example for one-off research and development crawls. Google introduced it to take such jobs off Googlebot. GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video are versions of it for image and video URLs.

• GoogleOther doesn't follow rules written for Googlebot, so blocking Googlebot doesn't block it. Source
• Google's Gary Illyes said in 2024 that opting out of GoogleOther might affect many things across Google, because it isn't tied to one product. Source

Does GoogleOther follow robots.txt?

Yes. Google lists GoogleOther among its common crawlers, which always obey robots.txt. Rules for GoogleOther also apply to GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video.

It doesn't honor Crawl-delay.

How to block or allow GoogleOther

Block it from the whole site:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Keep it out of one folder only:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /private/

A crawler that finds a group with its own name follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. If your * group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines in the GoogleOther group. robots.txt works per host, so add the rules to each subdomain you want covered.

Test the result with the robots.txt checker, or write a new file with the robots.txt generator.

What blocking GoogleOther changes

Google says rules for GoogleOther don't affect Google Search or any specific product. Because it isn't tied to one product, Google has said blocking it could affect various projects outside Search.

Where to see GoogleOther 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 recognizes GoogleOther and keeps it out of your visitor counts. With Premium, bot traffic shows which bots visit your site, how often and what kind they are.

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.
• 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.
• Google-Read-Aloud: Google-Read-Aloud fetches a page when someone asks Google to read it out loud. robots.txt doesn't stop it; a meta tag does.
• 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.