GoogleOther-Image: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt
GoogleOther-Image is operated by Google. It is classified here as Retrieval (Internal fetch, images). Verification method: Published CIDR list and reverse DNS.
Exact user-agent string
GoogleOther-Image/1.0
robots.txt token: GoogleOther-Image. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be
forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.
How to verify GoogleOther-Image 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-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
Disallow: /Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.
What blocking GoogleOther-Image costs you
Like its parent GoogleOther, crawl preferences for this token do not affect any specific Google product, so blocking it costs you no search visibility. If you serve expensive image assets it is one of the cheapest tokens to disallow.
What is specific to GoogleOther-Image
GoogleOther-Image publishes one of the shortest user-agent strings of any major crawler: the literal token and a version, with no Mozilla prefix, no browser identifiers, and no URL. Log filters written to match on Mozilla or on a trailing bot URL will miss it entirely. It is also the variant optimised for fetching publicly accessible image URLs, so its traffic pattern is asset-heavy rather than page-heavy, and bandwidth cost is the usual reason anyone notices it at all. A robots.txt rule addressed to GoogleOther applies to it too.
Verify a request claiming to be GoogleOther-Image
Check a GoogleOther-Image 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
- Googlebot - Search index
- GoogleOther - Internal fetch and analysis
- Googlebot News - Google News index
- GoogleOther-Video - Internal fetch, video
- Google-CloudVertexBot - Site-owner requested crawl
- Google-Extended - Control token, not a crawler