Autonomous agents
Google-Agent is a bot operated by Google that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. Google-Agent is used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.
Request says
"Google-Agent"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for Google-Agent. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | Google-AgentToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| Purpose | Autonomous agents |
| Respects robots.txt | Honourssource |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | Google-Agent |
| Operator documentation | https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers |
Google-Agent is used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: Google-Agent
Disallow: /User-agent: Google-Agent
Allow: /User-agent: Google-Agent
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking Google-Agent stops automated sessions that fill forms, click through flows and read pages the way a logged-in user would. Rate limits and challenges usually work better here than a robots.txt line.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
Google-Agent is a bot operated by Google that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. Google-Agent is used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.
Yes. The operator documents that Google-Agent reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.
You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.
Add the Google-Agent token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.
Blocking Google-Agent stops automated sessions that fill forms, click through flows and read pages the way a logged-in user would. Rate limits and challenges usually work better here than a robots.txt line.