resulthack

All AI crawlers /

GoogleOther

Google · Unconfirmed · robots.txt: Yes

A general-purpose Google crawler that product teams may use to fetch publicly accessible content, for example for one-off research and development crawls.

Block GoogleOther

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Google says rules addressed to GoogleOther don't affect any specific product, so blocking it does not change how you appear in Google Search.

Allow GoogleOther

User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /

An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block GoogleOther. 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 on a given path, and which line decides.

Facts

Operator
Google
Purpose
Unconfirmed by the operator

Google documents it as a generic crawler that its product teams may use to fetch public content, for example for one-off crawls for internal research and development. That is none of training, AI search or user fetch as Google states it.

Obeys robots.txt
Yes. GoogleOther is one of Google’s common crawlers, which Google says always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically.
In your server logs
The user-agent string contains "(compatible; GoogleOther)", in smartphone and desktop variants.
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 GoogleOther 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 is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.”

“Crawling preferences addressed to the GoogleOther user agent don't affect any specific product.”

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

“(KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther)”

“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

← All 39 AI crawlers