AI search crawlers

GoogleOther-Video

GoogleOther-Video 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-Video can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.

GoogleIP ranges + DNSrobots.txt:Honours

Live check

Verify an IP that claimed to be GoogleOther-Video

Paste the address from the log line. It is checked against what the operator publishes.

Reference

GoogleOther-Video at a glance

Reference data for the GoogleOther-Video crawler
User agentGoogleOther-Video

Token only: match on the substring.

OperatorGoogle
PurposeScrapes data.
Respects robots.txtHonourssource
Verification methodIP ranges + DNSPublished IP ranges or reverse DNS

Video variant of GoogleOther, covered by the same special-crawlers range file.

https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json

Crawl patternNot published
Robots.txt tokensGoogleOther-Video
Operator documentationhttps://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

Allow or block GoogleOther-Video

Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.

Block GoogleOther-Video
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Disallow: /
Allow GoogleOther-Video
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Allow: /
Allow, except the pages you never want quoted
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking GoogleOther-Video 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 crawler

FAQ

GoogleOther-Video questions

What is GoogleOther-Video?

GoogleOther-Video 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-Video can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.

Does GoogleOther-Video respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that GoogleOther-Video 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.

How do I verify a request really came from GoogleOther-Video?

Video variant of GoogleOther, covered by the same special-crawlers range file. The reference is published at https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json.

How do I block GoogleOther-Video?

Add the GoogleOther-Video 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.

Will blocking GoogleOther-Video hurt my search rankings?

Blocking GoogleOther-Video 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.

    GoogleOther-Video (Google): User Agent, IP Verification & robots.txt | IPScanner