GoogleOther-Image
GoogleOther-Image 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-Image can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
GoogleOther-Image at a glance
| User agent | GoogleOther-ImageToken only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header. |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| Purpose | Scrapes data. |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP ranges or reverse DNS Image variant of GoogleOther, covered by the same special-crawlers range file. https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | GoogleOther-Image |
| 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."
Allow or block GoogleOther-Image
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: GoogleOther-Image
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
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 GoogleOther-Image 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 GoogleOther-Image?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy GoogleOther-Image precisely because site owners allow it. Image variant of GoogleOther, covered by the same special-crawlers range file.
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.