01 · Operator
Who operates GoogleOther
- Company
- Type
- Other bot
- Official docs
- developers.google.com
02 · Behavior
What GoogleOther does
GoogleOther fetches publicly accessible pages for Google teams outside of Search indexing. Google gives one-off crawls for internal research and development as an example. Variants GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video fetch image and video URLs. Its robots.txt rules do not affect any specific Google product.
03 · Impact
Why GoogleOther matters for your site
If you allow it
- Blocking it does not affect Google Search rankings
- It is a verified Google crawler that follows robots.txt
If you block it
- It brings no direct traffic or visibility
- Crawled content serves internal Google purposes you cannot see
04 · Allow
How to allow GoogleOther
robots.txt
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "GoogleOther")
Action: Skip › All Super Bot Fight Mode rules
# Also check Security › Bots: "Block AI bots" can block it regardless of robots.txt.WordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /nginx
# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "GoogleOther") { return 403; }Apache
# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GoogleOther [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]05 · Block
How to block GoogleOther
GoogleOther follows robots.txt, so one rule is enough. Use a server or CDN rule only to stop spoofed copies.
robots.txt
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "GoogleOther")
Action: BlockWordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /nginx
# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "GoogleOther") {
return 403;
}Apache
# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GoogleOther [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>06 · User agents
User agents we see for GoogleOther
| User agent | Share | Last seen | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
GoogleOther |
80% | Verified | |
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/152.0.7977.64 Saf… |
9.7% | Verified | |
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/153.0.8010.36 Saf… |
7.8% | Verified | |
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Saf… |
2.7% | Verified |
07 · Verification
Is it really GoogleOther?
Anyone can copy a user agent. Real GoogleOther requests come from the IP ranges published at developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to googlebot.com</code>, <code>geo.googlebot.com, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.
IP addresses we saw from verified GoogleOther requests
| IP range | Share | Last seen |
|---|---|---|
66.249.64.0/20 |
58% | |
192.178.7.0/27 |
42% |
Always check against the operator’s current list; ranges change.
FAQ
Questions about GoogleOther
What is GoogleOther used for?
Google describes it as a generic crawler used by product teams to fetch public content. One example is one-off crawls for internal research and development.
Does blocking GoogleOther affect my Google Search rankings?
No. Google states that GoogleOther robots.txt rules do not affect any particular product, and Search uses Googlebot.
Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?
Yes. GoogleOther is one of Google's common crawlers, which always respect robots.txt rules for automatic crawls.
Last reviewed Oct 8, 2026