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Agent directory · AI and search crawler

Googlebot

Google's main crawler for Google Search. What it indexes also feeds Google's AI features in Search, such as AI Overviews.

Run by
Google
Type
AI and search crawler
Robots.txt name
Googlebot
Verifiable
Yes

What Googlebot does

Google's main crawler for Google Search. What it indexes also feeds Google's AI features in Search, such as AI Overviews.

As an AI and search crawler, it indexes pages so a search engine or AI search tool can find, cite and link to them. The kinds of AI agent that visit websites.

Should you allow it?

Allow it, unless you deliberately want to stay out of that search engine. Blocking it removes you from its results and answers. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.

How to allow or block Googlebot

Googlebot reads the Googlebot group in your robots.txt. To block it everywhere:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

To allow it everywhere, even if another rule blocks other bots:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Robots.txt is a request, not a lock: well-behaved crawlers follow it, impostors don't. Robots.txt for AI agents.

How it identifies itself

A typical user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

How to tell if it's really Googlebot

You can check a request that claims to be Googlebot against what Google publishes:

Requests that use the name but fail these checks are impostors, usually scrapers trying to get past bot protection. Ghost Agent Lab checks every request this way and gives you rules to block impostors. How to verify AI crawlers.

Every Google agent, and a robots.txt for all of them →

Does Googlebot visit your site? Ghost Agent Lab reads your CDN or server logs and shows every request from Googlebot and 1,566+ other known agents: what they read, what your site sent back, and whether each request was genuine. See agent traffic, or check whether AI agents can use your site for free.