Googlebot-News
Usually allowGooglebot-News is a robots.txt control token for Google News crawling preferences. Google documents that it has no standalone HTTP request User-Agent string.
Robots Control Token
This record is a robots.txt control token, not a standalone HTTP request User-Agent. Use the documented token for publisher controls and verify the underlying crawler traffic separately.
Googlebot-NewsNo standalone HTTP request User-Agent. Google News crawling uses various Googlebot HTTP request User-Agent strings; Googlebot-News is the robots.txt token.
Verification and Detection
Verification method: Use `Googlebot-News` as the documented robots.txt control token. Verify underlying crawler requests separately with Google documentation and network or request-level verification where available.
Googlebot-News is not a standalone HTTP request User-Agent. Do not detect network traffic by matching `Googlebot-News` in request User-Agent strings unless independent current evidence documents such a request signature.
Handling Guidance
This bot is usually safe to allow when the request source is verified and the behavior matches your site policy.
Googlebot-News is used for search indexing, URL discovery, page rendering, result freshness, and search-quality checks.
Record Details
- Aliases
- Google News Crawler Token
- Type
- control-token
- Operator
- Family
- Kind
- Robots Control
- Purpose
- News Crawl Control
- Identity
- Control Token
- Detection confidence
- High
- Spoofing risk
- Googlebot News Is A Publisher Control Token, Not An Authenticated Request Identity. A Request String Containing The Token Is Not Proof Of Operator Origin.
- Status
- Active
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Last verified
- 2026 07 05
Robots.txt Snippet
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /Traffic Matching
Live IP verification, reverse DNS, ASN and datacenter correlation, request history, connected-domain matches, behavioral context, and rule creation are kept inside Botcrawl Edge.
Open full record in Edge