GoogleOther: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt

GoogleOther is operated by Google. It is classified here as Retrieval (Internal fetch and analysis). Verification method: Published CIDR list and reverse DNS.

Exact user-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

robots.txt token: GoogleOther. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.

How to verify GoogleOther is genuine

Match the source IP against Google's published CIDR list: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json

169 ranges published, as of 2026-07-31. Pulled live at build time, never hardcoded.

A reverse DNS path also exists. See https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verify-google-requests.

How to block or allow GoogleOther

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.

What blocking GoogleOther costs you

Blocking GoogleOther does not affect Google Search rankings or indexing, because GoogleOther crawl preferences are not tied to a specific product. The cost is close to zero for search visibility, which makes it one of the few tokens you can disallow without a tradeoff argument.

What is specific to GoogleOther

GoogleOther is the generic token Google uses for one-off crawls and internal research that are not Search, which is why its preferences are documented as affecting no specific product. It is easy to file it in the wrong bucket: despite not serving Search, Google classifies it as a common crawler, so it shares Googlebot's common-crawlers.json range file and its crawl-*.googlebot.com reverse DNS mask. The special-crawlers.json file covers a different set entirely, the crawlers Google says may ignore robots.txt, which is AdsBot, AdSense, APIs-Google and Google-Safety. GoogleOther also has two narrower siblings, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, and a rule addressed to the parent token applies to both, since Google matches on any one of a crawler's tokens.

Verify a request claiming to be GoogleOther

Check a GoogleOther request against Google's published ranges

Source

Primary documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers. Last verified 2026-08-02.

Other Google crawlers

All crawlers and the full comparison table