Googlebot

Safe Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: Yes

Google's main search crawler for Google Search, Discover, Images, Video, and related products.

Key facts

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Purpose: Search
User-Agent: Googlebot
Should you block it?: Depends
Verified: Yes
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Identity type: Official Documented
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: Googlebot
robots.txt token: Googlebot
HTTP user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Aliases: Google Search crawler

Ownership

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Type: Search
Purpose: Search

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Verification: Use Google's official crawler verification guidance because user-agent strings can be spoofed.
IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
Operator URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/overview-google-crawlers
Source URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers

Blocking and detection

Robots

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "Googlebot")

Advanced server rules

Apache

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Googlebot") { return 403; }

Notes

Googlebot is Google’s main common crawler. Google says rules addressed to Googlebot affect Google Search and related products such as Discover, Images, Video, and News.

Google warns that user-agent strings can be spoofed and directs publishers to verify Google crawler traffic.

Evidence and source

Use Google's official crawler verification guidance because user-agent strings can be spoofed.

https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers