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What is GoogleOther, and should you allow it?

GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler: various Google product teams use it to fetch public pages, for example for one-off internal research crawls. Google states that rules addressed to it do not affect any specific product, so blocking it does not touch Search. Block it if its load costs you; it is not Google's training control.

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AI traffic · attensira.com30 days to 4 Oct 2026

0requests filed as GoogleOther · 30 days

of 143,601 AI crawler requests from 7 operators

Search engine crawlers on the board, beside attensira.com's rule for each
AgentAI requests, 30 daysattensira.com robots.txt
GoogleOther (this page)0Allowed
bingbot541Allowed
Googlebot189Allowed
Applebot0Allowed
Googlebot-Image0Parent's rule
Googlebot-Video0Parent's rule
GoogleOther-Image0Parent's rule
Kagibot0Wildcard
PetalBot0Wildcard

2 of 9 had requests filed in the window. User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.

Analyst agentAnalyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP, and our live robots.txt · · n=143,601 AI requests
Karl-Gustav KallasmaaKarl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated

How do I allow or block GoogleOther in robots.txt?

Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves GoogleOther today.

robots.txt · for your sitepaste-ready
# GoogleOther is generic product-team crawling. Google# states that preferences addressed to it do not affect# any specific product.User-agent: GoogleOtherDisallow: / # Search indexing is a different token. Leave it alone.User-agent: GooglebotAllow: /
Example · a group to paste, written for the token GoogleOther
attensira.com/robots.txtnamed · allowed
User-agent: GoogleOtherAllow: /Disallow: /api/
As served at attensira.com/robots.txt ·

We name GoogleOther and allow it everywhere except /api/, the same as every AI and search crawler we allow by name.

Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.

Who runs GoogleOther, and what is it for?

Google runs it, and we file it under product operations. Google's generic product-team crawling. Google states that rules addressed to it do not affect any specific product.

From Google’s documentation, read .

Why is GoogleOther a load decision, not a visibility one?

You can, at little cost. Google documents GoogleOther as a generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites, and it states that crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther user agent do not affect any specific product1. Google's own example of such a use is a one-off crawl for internal research and development7.

That second sentence is rare: an operator documenting that a rule has no product consequence. It turns the usual allow-or-block question around. For most crawlers, the question is what you lose by blocking. For GoogleOther, Google's answer is no specific product. So the decision is about load. If GoogleOther is a visible share of your crawling and you cannot tie it to anything you want, block it. If it is quiet, there is nothing to gain from writing the rule.

What blocking GoogleOther does not do is the more important half. It does not opt you out of training, and it does not touch Search.

Our own choice runs the other way. attensira.com's robots.txt gives GoogleOther a named group that allows the site and disallows only /api/, the same rule it gives Googlebot. A research crawl of a marketing site costs us little bandwidth, and a named group means the wildcard rules never reach it by accident.

Is GoogleOther Google's AI training crawler?

Google does not say so. Third-party bot lists describe GoogleOther in several ways Google does not: it has been called Google's training crawler, its Gemini grounding crawler, and its shadow index. Google's documentation supports none of those. It says "various product teams" and stops, so this page stops there too.

What is documented settles almost every real decision. Search indexing is Googlebot's job. The control for whether Google may use crawled content to train future Gemini models is Google-Extended, a separate token6. If your goal is to decline training, write the Google-Extended rule; a GoogleOther rule will not do it.

In the four-way job taxonomy of the AI crawler guide, GoogleOther is product operations. A rise in GoogleOther traffic is a bandwidth event, not a visibility event, and it is neither good nor bad news about how you do in AI answers.

How do I verify that a visit really came from GoogleOther?

A user-agent header is free text, so a log line naming GoogleOther is a claim until you check it.

Look up the visiting IP, confirm the hostname ends in one of the suffixes in the record, then look that hostname up and confirm it returns the same IP, or match the IP against the published ranges.

GoogleOther is one of Google's common crawlers, so it verifies the way Googlebot does. Google's robots.txt promise covers its crawler, not every request using the name, and a token nobody watches is a convenient disguise. The forward lookup after the reverse lookup is the step people skip and the one that makes the check mean anything.

Which GoogleOther tokens does one rule cover?

Google documents GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video as versions of GoogleOther optimised for image and video URLs, each with its own robots.txt token3. GoogleOther is also a valid token for both, so:

Rule you writeCovers
User-agent: GoogleOtherGoogleOther, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video
User-agent: GoogleOther-ImageGoogleOther-Image only
User-agent: *Every Google agent without a group of its own, Googlebot included

Choose the narrowest token that solves the problem you have. The robots.txt block above disallows GoogleOther and keeps an explicit Googlebot group, which is the shape of nearly every sensible GoogleOther rule: the point is that the two are separable. For the image case specifically, see GoogleOther-Image.

VerificationGoogle
Reverse DNS ends in
*.googlebot.com*.geo.googlebot.com
IP range file
common-crawlers.json
Researcher agentResearcherTranscribed from Google documentation ·

How should you match GoogleOther in logs?

Google's published strings carry Chrome/W.X.Y.Z as a placeholder for the Chrome version in use2. GoogleOther itself carries no version, so match the bare token GoogleOther, case-insensitively, as a whole word. Be careful with substring matches: GoogleOther also matches GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video. That is right for robots.txt and wrong for a report, where it quietly merges three agents into one row.

What can Attensira show you about GoogleOther?

AI traffic, on Growth and Business, counts crawler fetches by operator and declared purpose at the edge, so a research crawl sits apart from the Search crawl that feeds Google's AI answers. It reports user agents as sent; the reverse DNS round trip stays your step. Whether Google's AI Overviews cite you is read separately, every day, on every plan. See crawler logs and the robots.txt generator.

User-AgentGoogle
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Researcher agentResearcherTranscribed from Google documentation ·

Should I allow GoogleOther in my situation?

Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.

  • GoogleOther is a visible share of your crawl budget and you cannot tie it to any traffic.

    You can disallow it without touching Search. Decide on bandwidth grounds, not on visibility grounds.

    Google documents Googlebot as the crawler behind the search indexes and states that preferences addressed to GoogleOther do not affect any specific product. That makes GoogleOther one of the few Google tokens where a Disallow has no documented downside to weigh, so the question reduces to whether the fetches are costing you anything.

  • Someone on your team wants to block GoogleOther because a blog post described it as Google's AI training crawler.

    Do not act on that description. If training is the concern, the documented control is Google-Extended.

    Google's own documentation describes GoogleOther as generic product-team crawling and names no product. Google publishes Google-Extended as the explicit control over whether crawled content may be used for training future generations of Gemini models. Acting on a third-party characterisation instead of the operator's own leaves the actual concern unaddressed.

  • Your image CDN is being hit hard by something identifying as GoogleOther-Image.

    Address GoogleOther-Image by name, and verify the source addresses before you conclude it is real.

    Google documents GoogleOther-Image as its own robots.txt token, a version of GoogleOther optimised for fetching publicly accessible image URLs, so it can be limited without touching the parent token. Verification still comes first — the header is free text, and image endpoints are a favourite target for scrapers borrowing a trusted name.

What else do people ask?

Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?
Yes, when it crawls automatically. Google states that its common crawlers, GoogleOther among them, always respect robots.txt rules for automatic crawls. So a group naming GoogleOther is a control that works, and Google says it changes no specific product.
Does blocking GoogleOther affect Google Search?
No. Search indexing is Googlebot's documented job, and Google states that preferences addressed to GoogleOther do not affect any specific product. Keep a separate Googlebot group so a GoogleOther rule cannot be read as a Search rule.
Does a GoogleOther rule also cover GoogleOther-Image?
Yes. Google documents GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video as versions of GoogleOther with their own tokens, and GoogleOther is also a valid token for them. A GoogleOther group covers all three; a rule naming only GoogleOther-Image covers just that one.

Where do these facts come from?

7 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.

  1. Google documents GoogleOther as a generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites, and states that crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther user agent do not affect any specific product.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

    “Crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther user agent don't affect any specific product.”

  2. Google documents GoogleOther in a desktop form, "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36", and a mobile form carrying the same bare GoogleOther token.

    developers.google.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source

  3. Google documents GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video as versions of GoogleOther optimised for fetching publicly accessible image and video URLs, each with its own robots.txt user agent token.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

  4. Google states that its common crawlers always respect robots.txt rules for automatic crawls.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

    “always respect robots.txt rules for automatic crawls”

  5. Google documents verifying its common crawlers by reverse DNS lookup to a hostname ending in googlebot.com or geo.googlebot.com followed by a forward lookup back to the same address, or by matching the address against its published common-crawlers.json range file.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

  6. Google documents Google-Extended as the standalone product token publishers use to manage whether content Google crawls may be used for training future generations of Gemini models.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

  7. Google gives one-off crawls for internal research and development as an example of what GoogleOther may be used for.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

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