GoogleOther-Video: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt
GoogleOther-Video is operated by Google. It is classified here as Retrieval (Internal fetch, video). Verification method: Published CIDR list and reverse DNS.
Exact user-agent string
GoogleOther-Video/1.0
robots.txt token: GoogleOther-Video. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be
forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.
How to verify GoogleOther-Video 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-Video
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Disallow: /Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.
What blocking GoogleOther-Video costs you
No specific Google product depends on it, so blocking costs no search visibility. For sites serving large video files this is the token where blocking has a measurable effect on your bandwidth bill rather than on your traffic.
What is specific to GoogleOther-Video
GoogleOther-Video is the video-optimised variant of GoogleOther and shares its bare user-agent format, just the token and a version with no browser prefix. Because video fetches are large and often ranged, this is the Google token most likely to show up as unexplained egress rather than as pageviews, and the one people most often misidentify as an abusive scraper before checking it against Google's published ranges. It resolves under the same crawl-*.googlebot.com reverse DNS mask as Googlebot, so it is fully verifiable despite the thin user-agent.
Verify a request claiming to be GoogleOther-Video
Check a GoogleOther-Video 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-Image - Internal fetch, images
- Google-CloudVertexBot - Site-owner requested crawl
- Google-Extended - Control token, not a crawler