GoogleOther: what it is, and how to allow or block it in robots.txt

Key point. GoogleOther is a Google crawler with a narrow purpose. It does not decide whether AI search engines can find or cite you. It follows robots.txt.

GoogleOther at a glance

These are the facts our registry holds for GoogleOther, checked against Google's documentation on October 14, 2026.

VendorGoogle
PurposeOther
TypeUser agent
Follows robots.txtYes; source: community ai.robots.txt list (commit 9ad8a47e)
Vendor documentationGoogle crawler page, checked October 14, 2026
Published IP rangesdevelopers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json

What is GoogleOther?

GoogleOther is a Google crawler with a narrow purpose. It does not decide whether AI search engines can find or cite you.

In Google's own words (Google's crawler documentation, read October 14, 2026):

  • “GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites.”

Google uses other names for other jobs: Googlebot (web search); Google-Extended (AI training); Google-CloudVertexBot (other). Each takes its own robots.txt group.

Does GoogleOther follow robots.txt?

Yes, GoogleOther follows robots.txt: our registry records this from the community ai.robots.txt list (commit 9ad8a47e).

What Google says about its common crawlers (Google's crawler documentation, read October 14, 2026):

  • “They always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.”

A robots.txt rule records your request. It does not prove a crawler honours it, and firewall or CDN bot settings can refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows, so check those too.

How do I block GoogleOther in robots.txt?

Add a group that names GoogleOther and disallows the whole site:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

To keep it out of one folder only, disallow that path instead, for example Disallow: /private/.

How do I allow GoogleOther?

GoogleOther is allowed by default: if no group names it and no User-agent: * rule blocks it, it may read every page. A crawler obeys the most specific group that names it and falls back to User-agent: * only when no group names it (RFC 9309), so if a catch-all rule blocks crawlers, add a group for it:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /

How can I tell if a request really comes from GoogleOther?

Match the request's IP address against Google's published list, because user agents can be faked: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json.

How often do startup websites block GoogleOther?

We have no figure for GoogleOther: it was not one of the crawlers our AI Crawler Access Report tracked. For the crawlers it did track, the headline figure is: “3 of 569 startup websites (0.5%; 95% interval 0.2% to 1.5%) block at least one AI search crawler (Elementera AI Crawler Access Report, October 2026).”

The method and the per-crawler table are in the AI Crawler Access Report.

How do I check whether my robots.txt blocks GoogleOther?

Read the group by hand: our free crawler checker covers 13 crawlers, and GoogleOther is not one of them yet.

  1. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt.
  2. Look for a User-agent: GoogleOther line. If there is one, only that group applies to GoogleOther.
  3. If there is none, the User-agent: * group applies.
  4. Within the group, the longest matching Allow or Disallow rule for a path wins.

Where can I see every AI crawler?

Our list of AI crawlers shows all 26 names in our registry, filtered by purpose. The same data is a free JSON download in our AI crawler registry.

Frequently asked questions

Three questions site owners ask about this name, each answered in one paragraph.

Should I block GoogleOther?

Usually there is no need. It does not decide whether AI search engines can find or cite you. Blocking it does not decide whether AI search engines can cite you.

Does blocking GoogleOther affect other crawlers?

No. robots.txt groups are matched by name, so a group for GoogleOther applies only to GoogleOther. Google's other names (Googlebot, Google-Extended, Google-CloudVertexBot) need their own groups.

How do I see whether GoogleOther visits my site?

Search your server or CDN logs for GoogleOther in the user agent. User agents can be faked, so check the request's IP address against Google's published list: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json

Work with us

There are two ways to work with us. Teams that want the work done for them can use our managed AEO services: Book a call. Teams that want to see where they stand first can start with Lenz, our free analysis of how ChatGPT and Gemini answer their buyers' questions: Get your free AI visibility report.

How this page was made

A script builds this page from our AI crawler registry, the vendor crawler pages we read on October 14, 2026, and, for the blocking figures, the AI Crawler Access Report. Every sentence in quotation marks was checked against the vendor's page that day. Soroush Mehri reviewed the page, and Mojtaba Ebadi approved it for publication.

Sources