Agent directory · AI training crawler
GoogleOther
A general-purpose Google crawler used by Google's product and research teams, separate from Google Search.
- Run by
- Type
- AI training crawler
- Robots.txt name
GoogleOther- Verifiable
- Yes
What GoogleOther does
A general-purpose Google crawler used by Google's product and research teams, separate from Google Search.
As an AI training crawler, it collects public pages that may be used to train AI models. The kinds of AI agent that visit websites.
Should you allow it?
A real business choice. Lean towards blocking if your content is the product (publishing, research, courses); lean towards allowing if your pages exist to sell something else. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.
How to allow or block GoogleOther
GoogleOther reads the GoogleOther group in your robots.txt. To block it everywhere:
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /To allow it everywhere, even if another rule blocks other bots:
User-agent: GoogleOther
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; GoogleOther)How to tell if it's really GoogleOther
You can check a request that claims to be GoogleOther against what Google publishes:
- IP ranges: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json
- IP ranges: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/special-crawlers.json
- IP ranges: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/user-triggered-fetchers.json
- IP ranges: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/user-triggered-fetchers-google.json
- Reverse DNS: the address resolves to a name ending in
googlebot.com,google.com,googleusercontent.com, and that name resolves back to the same address
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.
Other agents from Google
- Googlebot: AI and search crawler
- Google-Extended: AI training crawler
- Google-InspectionTool: AI and search crawler
- Storebot-Google: AI and search crawler
- AdsBot-Google: other bot
- Gemini-Deep-Research: AI assistant
- Google-CloudVertexBot: AI training crawler
- Google-Gemini-CLI: autonomous agent
- Google-NotebookLM: AI assistant
- GoogleAgent-Mariner: autonomous agent
- GoogleAgent-URLContext: AI assistant
Every Google agent, and a robots.txt for all of them →
Does GoogleOther visit your site? Ghost Agent Lab reads your CDN or server logs and shows every request from GoogleOther 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.