Googlebot
Googlebot is a bot operated by Google that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Googlebot is the crawler behind Google Search. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Googlebot can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Googlebot at a glance
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| Purpose | Search indexing that also feeds AI Overviews |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP ranges or reverse DNS Two options: reverse DNS on the source IP must return a googlebot.com or google.com host and a forward lookup of that host must return the same IP, or the IP must appear in googlebot.json. https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json |
| Crawl pattern | Continuous, rate adapted per site. |
| Robots.txt tokens | Googlebot |
| Operator documentation | https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot |
Googlebot is the crawler behind Google Search. It is not an AI training crawler, but pages it indexes can be summarised in AI Overviews and used for grounding in Gemini, so blocking Google-Extended without blocking Googlebot is the usual way to stay in Search while opting out of training.
Allow or block Googlebot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking Googlebot 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.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really Googlebot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Googlebot precisely because site owners allow it. Two options: reverse DNS on the source IP must return a googlebot.com or google.com host and a forward lookup of that host must return the same IP, or the IP must appear in googlebot.json.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
Other crawlers run by Google
Related crawlers
Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand
Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.