Bots
GoogleOther-Image: allow it or block it?
GoogleOther-Image is the image version of Google's generic crawler, used by Google product teams to fetch public image URLs. Google states rules addressed to it do not affect any specific product. You can block it without leaving Google Images, which is crawled by Googlebot-Image, as long as your rule names the right token and not a wildcard.
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0requests filed as GoogleOther-Image · 30 days
of 143,601 AI crawler requests from 7 operators
| Agent | AI requests, 30 days | attensira.com robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| GoogleOther-Image (this page) | 0 | Parent's rule |
| bingbot | 541 | Allowed |
| Googlebot | 189 | Allowed |
| Applebot | 0 | Allowed |
| Googlebot-Image | 0 | Parent's rule |
| Googlebot-Video | 0 | Parent's rule |
| GoogleOther | 0 | Allowed |
| Kagibot | 0 | Wildcard |
| PetalBot | 0 | Wildcard |
2 of 9 had requests filed in the window. User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP, and our live robots.txt · · n=143,601 AI requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block GoogleOther-Image in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves GoogleOther-Image today.
# Keep the generic image fetcher out; leave Google Images# alone.User-agent: GoogleOther-ImageDisallow: / User-agent: Googlebot-ImageAllow: /# No group names GoogleOther-Image, so it reads the# GoogleOther group.User-agent: GoogleOtherAllow: /Disallow: /api/We do not name GoogleOther-Image. It follows the GoogleOther group instead (Google lists GoogleOther as its second token), which allows everything except /api/.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs GoogleOther-Image, 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 .
Can you block GoogleOther-Image and stay in Google Images?
Yes, if you name the right token. Google describes GoogleOther-Image as the version of GoogleOther optimised for fetching publicly accessible image URLs, and states that crawling preferences addressed to it do not affect any specific product2. GoogleOther itself is the generic crawler various Google product teams may use, for example for one-off crawls for internal research and development5.
So there is no documented surface where a fetch by this agent ends with your image shown and linked. The crawler behind Google Images is Googlebot-Image. The robots.txt block above refuses the generic image fetcher and keeps Googlebot-Image allowed, which is what most sites with an image-bandwidth problem actually want.
Whatever Google's internal uses for these fetches are, it has not published them, and this page does not guess. What is documented is enough to decide: a GoogleOther-Image rule is not a Search decision.
How do I verify that a visit really came from GoogleOther-Image?
A user-agent header is free text, so a log line naming GoogleOther-Image 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.
Documented among Google's common crawlers, so it shares their range file and the crawl-*.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-*.geo.googlebot.com hostnames. A token with no product behind it is a better disguise than a famous one, because nobody investigates a spike in it. A heavy stream that fails the check was never reachable by robots.txt; block it at your CDN.
Which of Google's four image-capable tokens does your rule reach?
This is where sites lose image coverage. Four Google tokens can result in an image being fetched: Googlebot, Googlebot-Image, GoogleOther and GoogleOther-Image. They have different documented effects, and two of them are parents of the other two. Google lists GoogleOther as a second valid token for this crawler and states that only one token needs to match for a rule to apply4.
GoogleOther-Image- It governs GoogleOther-Image?
- Yes
- It governs Googlebot-Image?
- No
GoogleOther- It governs GoogleOther-Image?
- Yes
- It governs Googlebot-Image?
- No
Googlebot- It governs GoogleOther-Image?
- No
- It governs Googlebot-Image?
- Yes, as its parent token
*(wildcard)- It governs GoogleOther-Image?
- Yes, if it has no group of its own
- It governs Googlebot-Image?
- Yes, if it has no group of its own
The wildcard row is the one that hurts. A Disallow: / under User-agent: *, written to keep generic scrapers off an image CDN, also reaches Googlebot-Image unless it has its own group. Image coverage then collapses, and nothing in robots.txt warns you. The fix is a named group: Google's crawlers follow only the most specific group that matches them and never combine it with the wildcard1, so a Googlebot-Image group with Allow: / exempts it in full. Give every Google image token you care about its own group, with every rule you want for it.
- Reverse DNS ends in
- *.googlebot.com*.geo.googlebot.com
- IP range file
- common-crawlers.json
ResearcherTranscribed from Google documentation · Agents filed beside GoogleOther-Image
How should you match GoogleOther-Image in logs?
Filter on the bare token GoogleOther-Image, case-insensitively, as a whole word. The 1.0 is a version Google may increment, so do not pin it. Watch substring matches: a filter for GoogleOther also matches GoogleOther-Image. That is correct for robots.txt, where Google says GoogleOther is a valid token for this crawler, and wrong in a log report, where it silently merges two agents into one row and hides which of them is costing you bandwidth.
Where does GoogleOther-Image sit among crawler jobs?
In the four-way job taxonomy of the AI crawler guide, it is product operations, on Google's own description. It is not search indexing, because no documented surface shows your image as a result of its fetch. It is not training either; Google's documented training control is Google-Extended, which fetches nothing. So a change in GoogleOther-Image traffic tells you about bandwidth and nothing about how Google's AI answers treat you.
What can Attensira show you about GoogleOther-Image?
AI traffic, on Growth and Business, counts crawler fetches per operator and declared purpose, measured at the edge, so you can see which Google agents spend your bandwidth. It reports user agents as sent and leaves the reverse DNS check to you. How Google's AI Overviews describe and cite you is a separate daily reading, on every plan. See crawler logs, and use the robots.txt generator to give each image token its own group.
GoogleOther-Image/1.0Should I allow GoogleOther-Image in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
You want to keep image scraping for internal research out while staying fully present in Google Images.
Disallow GoogleOther-Image and leave Googlebot-Image allowed.
Google documents these as separate tokens with separately described effects — one affects no specific product, the other affects Google Images, Discover and Search features where images and favicons appear. Splitting them is exactly the distinction the two tokens exist to give you.
A wildcard rule blocked everything Google-shaped and image coverage collapsed.
Replace the wildcard with per-token groups and check which of the four image-capable tokens you actually meant.
Googlebot, Googlebot-Image, GoogleOther and GoogleOther-Image are four separate tokens with four separate documented effects, and a wildcard group reaches all of them plus everything else without a group of its own. The token that costs you placements is not the token most people are annoyed about.
You see GoogleOther-Image in the logs and want to know whether it is a Search signal.
Report it in its own row, not in a bot-traffic total.
Google documents this agent as not affecting any specific product. Its volume therefore says nothing about your standing in Search or in any AI surface, and averaging it into a crawler total makes that total mean less than it did before.
What else do people ask?
Does GoogleOther-Image respect robots.txt?
Is GoogleOther-Image the crawler behind Google Images?
Does a GoogleOther rule apply to GoogleOther-Image?
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.
Google documents that only one robots.txt group is valid for a particular crawler. Its crawlers follow the group with the most specific user agent that matches and ignore the others, and user-agent-specific groups are not combined with the * group.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“Only one group is valid for a particular crawler.”
Google documents that crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther-Image user agent do not affect any specific product, similar to GoogleOther, and describes GoogleOther-Image as the version of GoogleOther optimized for fetching publicly accessible image URLs.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“GoogleOther-Image is the version of GoogleOther optimized for fetching publicly accessible image URLs.”
Google publishes GoogleOther-Image's User-Agent in HTTP requests as "GoogleOther-Image/1.0".
developers.google.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“GoogleOther-Image/1.0”
Google documents two robots.txt user agent tokens for this crawler, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther, and states that only one crawler token needs to match for a rule to apply.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“Some crawlers have more than one user agent token; you need to match only one crawler token for a rule to apply.”
Google documents GoogleOther as the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites, for example for one-off crawls for internal research and development.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.”
Google states that its common crawlers always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“They always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.”
Google documents that the common crawlers generally crawl from the IP ranges published in the common-crawlers.json object and that the reverse DNS mask of their hostname matches crawl-***-***-***-***.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-***-***-***-***.geo.googlebot.com.
developers.google.com · retrieved
“The common crawlers generally crawl from the IP ranges published in the common-crawlers.json object”
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