GoogleOther

Neutral Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: Yes

Google generic crawler used by various product teams for publicly accessible content.

Generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers#googleother

Key facts

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

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: GoogleOther
robots.txt token: GoogleOther
HTTP user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Aliases: Google generic crawler

Ownership

Operator: Google
Family: Google
Type: Ai
Purpose: General Crawl

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Last checked: 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/google-common-crawlers
Source URL: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
Spoofing risk: User-agent strings can be spoofed. For allow-listing or low-friction rules, pair the published identifier with operator documentation or cryptographic verification when available.

Blocking and detection

Robots

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "GoogleOther")

Advanced server rules

Apache

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

Nginx

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

Notes

GoogleOther is a generic Google crawler that may be used for one-off internal research and development fetches. Google says it does not affect Google Search or other specific products.

Use the dedicated token if you want to control this crawl class separately from Googlebot.

Evidence and source

Use Google's official crawler verification guidance because user-agent strings can be spoofed.
Generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers#googleother
User-agent strings can be spoofed. For allow-listing or low-friction rules, pair the published identifier with operator documentation or cryptographic verification when available.

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