AI search crawlers
GoogleOther is a bot operated by Google that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. "Used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be GoogleOther can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Request says
"GoogleOther"
Checked against
Google's IP ranges and reverse DNS
Live check
Paste the address from the log line. It is checked against what the operator publishes.
Reference
| User agent | GoogleOtherToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| Purpose | Scrapes data. |
| Respects robots.txt | Honourssource |
| Verification method | IP ranges + DNSPublished IP ranges or reverse DNS Listed in Google's special-crawlers range file, and reverse DNS resolves under googlebot.com. Used by internal Google teams for one-off crawls rather than by Search indexing. https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | GoogleOther |
| Operator documentation | https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers |
"Used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development."
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking GoogleOther takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
GoogleOther is a bot operated by Google that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. "Used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be GoogleOther can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Yes. The operator documents that GoogleOther 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.
Listed in Google's special-crawlers range file, and reverse DNS resolves under googlebot.com. Used by internal Google teams for one-off crawls rather than by Search indexing. The reference is published at https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json.
Add the GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.