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Googlebot

Google · AI search · robots.txt: Yes

Google's main crawler: it fetches pages for Google Search, including the AI Overviews and AI Mode answers built into it, and for Google Images, Video, News and Discover.

Block Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Blocking Googlebot stops Google crawling your pages for Google Search — which, by Google's account, includes AI Overviews and AI Mode — and for Google Images, Video, News and Discover. To stay in Search but limit what is shown from a page, Google points to nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex instead. Google-Extended does not help here: Google says it covers training and grounding in Google's other systems and does not affect Search.

This token also decides Google Search. The robots.txt generator leaves it to the rest of your file unless you choose Allow or Block for it by name.

Allow Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block Googlebot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.

Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.

Already have a robots.txt? Paste it into the robots.txt checker to see whether it blocks Googlebot on a given path, and which line decides.

Facts

Operator
Google
Purpose
AI search index

Googlebot crawls for Google Search as a whole. Google says AI is built into Search, and a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet in Google Search to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Obeys robots.txt
Yes. Google says its common crawlers, Googlebot among them, always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically, and that robots.txt rules for Googlebot are how a site owner manages how the site is crawled for Search, AI features included. There is no separate token for AI Overviews or AI Mode.
In your server logs
The user-agent string contains "Googlebot/2.1", in smartphone and desktop variants whose Chrome version changes; rarely it is the bare "Googlebot/2.1".
How to verify it
Google says to run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP, check the name ends in googlebot.com, google.com or googleusercontent.com, then run a forward lookup and confirm it returns the same IP; or match the IP against the published common-crawlers list.

Published list: developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json — 170 IPv4 and 147 IPv6 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 23 Sep 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them. To count real and fake Googlebot requests in your own server log against this list, drop the log into the log reader.

What Google says

Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.

“Crawling preferences addressed to the Googlebot user agent affect Google Search (including Discover and all Google Search features), as well as other products such as Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover.”

“AI is built into Search and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt directives for Googlebot is the control for site owners to manage access to how their sites are crawled for Search.”

“To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements.”

“To limit the information shown from your pages in Search, use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex controls.”

“To limit AI training and grounding in some of Google's other systems, read more about Google-Extended.”

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

“(KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1;”

“The common crawlers generally crawl from the IP ranges published in the common-crawlers.json object, and the reverse DNS mask of their hostname matches crawl-***-***-***-***.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-***-***-***-***.geo.googlebot.com.”

“Verify that the domain name is either googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com.”

“Verify that it's the same as the original accessing IP address from your logs.”

Sources

Other crawlers from Google

Same purpose, other operators

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