What is GoogleOther? How to allow or block Google's crawler

GoogleOther is Google's crawler serving both AI search features and model training. Google's generic crawler for research and internal product uses.

Officially documented by Google and respects robots.txt like the rest of its crawler family.

Add "User-agent: GoogleOther" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt file. The change takes effect the next time the bot fetches your robots.txt.

No. GoogleOther is separate from Googlebot, which handles Google Search indexing. Blocking GoogleOther has no effect on your traditional search rankings, but it does remove your pages from the AI answers Google's assistant serves to its users.

Search your server access logs for the string "GoogleOther" — for example: grep -i "GoogleOther" /var/log/nginx/access.log | wc -l. Our free AI Bot Log Analyzer does this in your browser: paste a log file and it counts hits per AI crawler, including GoogleOther, with per-path breakdowns.

You don't — GoogleOther isn't a tool you run. It's Google's own crawler, operated by Google, that visits your site from their infrastructure. The only control you have over it is whether you allow or block it, via robots.txt or a server rule. If you're looking to crawl other sites yourself, you'd write your own crawler or use a crawling library; sending "GoogleOther" as your user agent would be impersonating Google.

Almost certainly not. Crawl-delay was never part of the original robots.txt specification — Google has publicly said it ignores the directive, and the AI crawlers that model their parsers on Google's do the same. Google publishes no position on crawl-delay for GoogleOther, so treat it as unsupported. If GoogleOther is hitting your site harder than you want, rate-limit it at the server or CDN instead: a Cloudflare rate-limiting rule or an nginx limit_req zone matched on the user agent will actually be enforced, whereas a crawl-delay line is only a request that this agent likely never reads.

Google states GoogleOther honors robots.txt, so if you are still seeing hits the cause is usually one of four things rather than the bot misbehaving. First, robots.txt is cached — Google may be working from a copy fetched up to 24 hours before your change. Second, the rule may not match: robots.txt user-agent matching is on a prefix of the token, and a typo or a trailing character breaks it silently. Third, the block may sit under a different user-agent group than the one this bot reads, since a bot obeys only the most specific group that matches it, not the wildcard group as well. Fourth, the traffic may be something else sending GoogleOther as its user agent, which anything can do.

Treat it as no unless Google says otherwise. Rendering JavaScript costs an order of magnitude more than fetching HTML, and most AI crawlers — unlike Googlebot, which runs a full headless Chrome — read the raw HTML response and stop there. The practical consequence: anything your page loads client-side after the initial response is likely invisible to GoogleOther. If your main content is client-rendered, server-render it or pre-render it so the text exists in the first response.

Google publishes them as JSON at https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json, updated as their infrastructure changes. Fetch that file rather than hard-coding the prefixes, and match the request IP against it to confirm a visit is genuinely GoogleOther. This is the only reliable check — the user-agent header is self-declared, so a scraper can send "GoogleOther" while coming from anywhere.

There is no published schedule, and no operator commits to one. Training crawlers like GoogleOther typically sweep in bursts rather than at a steady rate — quiet for weeks, then hundreds of requests over a day or two as a collection run reaches your domain. Larger and more-linked sites are revisited more often. The only way to know for your own site is to measure it: grep your access log for the user agent, or paste the log into our AI Bot Log Analyzer, which breaks hits down by date and path in your browser.

Google publishes it at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers. That page is the authoritative source for the user-agent string and Google's stated crawling policy, and Google also publishes GoogleOther's IP ranges as JSON at https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json so you can verify requests rather than trusting the header.