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Monitoring bot · Google

Google-Safety is Google’s monitoring bot

Google-Safety is a Google special-case crawler for abuse detection. It checks publicly posted links on Google properties, for example for malware.

Verifiable operator Ignores robots.txt

Our take

Allow

It is a documented Google safety crawler, and it ignores robots.txt anyway.

User agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.5735.179 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Safety; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

01 · Operator

Who operates Google-Safety

Company
Google
Official docs
developers.google.com

02 · Behavior

What Google-Safety does

It handles abuse-specific crawling, such as malware discovery for links posted publicly on Google properties. Google states that it ignores robots.txt rules. Requests come from Google's special-crawler IP ranges.

03 · Impact

Why Google-Safety matters for your site

If you allow it

  • Helps Google detect malware and abuse
  • Blocking via robots.txt has no effect
  • Verified requests come from Google

If you block it

  • Unverified requests may be fakes using the name
  • Firewall blocking only, since robots.txt is ignored

04 · Allow

How to allow Google-Safety

robots.txt

User-agent: Google-Safety
Allow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "Google-Safety")
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: Google-Safety
Allow: /

nginx

# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "Google\-Safety") { return 403; }

Apache

# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Google\-Safety [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

05 · Block

How to block Google-Safety

Google-Safety has been reported to ignore robots.txt. Block it at your CDN or web server as well.

robots.txt

# Google-Safety has been reported to ignore robots.txt.
# Add a Cloudflare, nginx or Apache rule as well.
User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "Google-Safety")
Action:     Block

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: Google-Safety
Disallow: /

nginx

# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Google\-Safety") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Google\-Safety [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

06 · User agents

User agents we see for Google-Safety

The user agent published by the operator:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.5735.179 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Safety; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

07 · Verification

Is it really Google-Safety?

Anyone can copy a user agent. Real Google-Safety requests come from the IP ranges published at developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/special-crawlers.json. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to google.com, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.

FAQ

Questions about Google-Safety

What is Google-Safety?

It is a Google crawler for abuse detection, such as finding malware in links posted on Google properties.

Does Google-Safety respect robots.txt?

No. Google documents that the Google-Safety user agent ignores robots.txt rules.

How can I verify Google-Safety?

Check the IP against Google's special-crawlers.json list, or run a reverse DNS lookup that resolves to rate-limited-proxy-*.google.com.

Last reviewed Oct 8, 2026

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