Googlebot-News

Safe Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: Yes

Google News robots.txt token used to control crawling preferences for Google News.

Controls crawling preferences for Google News surfaces.

Key facts

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Purpose: Unknown
User-Agent: Googlebot-News
Should you block it?: Depends
Verified: Yes
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Identity type: Unknown
Confidence: High
Last checked: 2026-04-03

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: Googlebot-News
robots.txt token: Googlebot-News
HTTP user-agent: No separate HTTP request user-agent string. Crawling is done with various Googlebot user-agent strings.

Ownership

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

Verification and trust

Source type: Unknown
Confidence: High
Last checked: 2026-04-03
Verification: Verify as Googlebot traffic using Google’s crawler verification guidance; control it with the Googlebot-News robots token.
Operator URL: https://news.google.com/
Source URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
Spoofing risk: User-agent strings can be spoofed. Verify with the operator’s published guidance before allow-listing.

Blocking and detection

Officially documented as a Google common crawler token affecting Google News.

Robots

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "Googlebot-News")

Advanced server rules

Apache

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot-News [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx

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

Notes

Googlebot-News is a Google robots.txt user-agent token for Google News. Google says it does not have its own separate HTTP request user-agent string and crawls with various Googlebot user-agent strings.

Evidence and source

Verify as Googlebot traffic using Google’s crawler verification guidance; control it with the Googlebot-News robots token.
Officially documented as a Google common crawler token affecting Google News.
Controls crawling preferences for Google News surfaces.
User-agent strings can be spoofed. Verify with the operator’s published guidance before allow-listing.

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