GoogleOther-Image
Google · Unconfirmed · robots.txt: Yes
The version of Google's generic GoogleOther crawler optimized for fetching publicly accessible image URLs.
Block GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
Disallow: /Google says crawling preferences addressed to GoogleOther-Image don't affect any specific Google product, the same as for GoogleOther.
Allow GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block GoogleOther-Image. 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 GoogleOther-Image on a given path, and which line decides.
Who blocks it
GoogleOther-Image is not in the 2026-10-09 survey: it was added to this directory after we last read the most-visited sites' robots.txt files, so we have no count for it yet.
Facts
- Operator
- Purpose
- Unconfirmed by the operator
Google documents it as the version of GoogleOther, its generic crawler for product teams, optimized for fetching publicly accessible image URLs. That is none of training, AI search or user fetch as Google states it.
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. GoogleOther-Image is one of Google's common crawlers, which Google says always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically. Google lists two robots.txt tokens for it: GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "GoogleOther-Image/1.0".
- 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 8 Oct 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them. To count real and fake GoogleOther-Image 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.
“GoogleOther-Image is the version of GoogleOther optimized for fetching publicly accessible image URLs.”
“Crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther-Image user agent don't affect any specific product, similar to GoogleOther.”
“They always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.”
“User-agent token in robots.txt GoogleOther-Image GoogleOther”
“User-Agent in HTTP requests GoogleOther-Image/1.0”
“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
- Google: List of Google's common crawlers — fetched and checked 2026-10-09
- Google: Verify requests from Google — fetched and checked 2026-10-09
- Google: common crawler IP ranges (common-crawlers.json) — fetched and checked 2026-10-09