Does Google-CloudVertexBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that Google-CloudVertexBot 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 Google-CloudVertexBot?

Crawls on behalf of a Vertex AI customer building their own grounded agent. Blocking it blocks that customer, not Google Search. The reference is published at https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json.

How do I block Google-CloudVertexBot?

Add these user-agent tokens (Google-CloudVertexBot, CloudVertexBot) 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.

IPScanner

Autonomous agents

Google-CloudVertexBot

Google-CloudVertexBot is a bot operated by Google that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. Google-CloudVertexBot crawls sites on the site owners' request when building Vertex AI Agents. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Google-CloudVertexBot can be checked against a published IP range file.

Also seen as CloudVertexBot. Rules need to cover every token.

Google-CloudVertexBot at a glance

Reference data for the Google-CloudVertexBot crawler
User agent	`Google-CloudVertexBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Google
Purpose	Build and manage AI models for businesses employing Vertex AI
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	Published IP range file Crawls on behalf of a Vertex AI customer building their own grounded agent. Blocking it blocks that customer, not Google Search. https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`Google-CloudVertexBotCloudVertexBot`
Operator documentation	https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers

Google-CloudVertexBot crawls sites on the site owners' request when building Vertex AI Agents.

robots.txt

Allow or block Google-CloudVertexBot

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.

Block Google-CloudVertexBot

User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: CloudVertexBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow Google-CloudVertexBot

User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: CloudVertexBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: CloudVertexBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking Google-CloudVertexBot 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.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really Google-CloudVertexBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Google-CloudVertexBot precisely because site owners allow it. Crawls on behalf of a Vertex AI customer building their own grounded agent. Blocking it blocks that customer, not Google Search.

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.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

Other crawlers run by Google

Gemini-Deep-ResearchAssistant fetchers Google-AgentAutonomous agents Google-ExtendedTraining crawlers Google-FirebaseOther automated crawlers Google-Gemini-CLICoding agents Google-NotebookLMAssistant fetchers

Related crawlers

Gemini-Deep-ResearchGoogle · Assistant fetchers Google-AgentGoogle · Autonomous agents Google-ExtendedGoogle · Training crawlers ChatGPT AgentOpenAI · Autonomous agents Claude-WebAnthropic · Autonomous agents

Agentscan

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.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ