Training · Google
GoogleOther
Google's generic crawler for one-off fetches by internal teams, including research and development. It is not used for Search. Blocking it has no effect on rankings.
- Operator
- Purpose
- Training crawlers
- Feeds
- Google (other products)
- robots.txt token
GoogleOtherAlso:GoogleOther-ImageGoogleOther-Video- Honours robots.txt
- Honours robots.txt
- Documentation
- developers.google.com
What it looks like in server logs
A representative user-agent string. Version numbers change; the GoogleOther token does not. Paste your own log line into the user-agent checker to confirm a match.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GoogleOther)How to block GoogleOther
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Robots.txt is advisory: it works only on crawlers that choose to read it. This one is honours robots.txt according to its operator.
User-agent: GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Disallow: /
To block every training crawler at once, or to block training while keeping AI search citations, use the robots.txt generator.
How to allow GoogleOther while blocking others
A more specific User-agent group wins over a wildcard. Place this above any User-agent: * block that disallows paths, and GoogleOther keeps full access.
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /
How to verify a genuine hit
The user-agent string is self-asserted: anyone can send it from a laptop, and scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to slip past filters aimed at unknown ones.
Google publishes IP ranges for its common crawlers; a hit from outside them is spoofed.