Google · General-purpose Google crawler
GoogleOther: what it is & how to allow or block it
GoogleOther is a generic crawler Google teams use for one-off fetches and research/development crawls, separate from the search-index Googlebot. GoogleOther honors robots.txt. Blocking it does not affect Google Search indexing (which uses Googlebot).
- User-agent
GoogleOther- Operator
- Type
- General-purpose Google crawler
- robots.txt
- GoogleOther honors robots.txt. Blocking it does not affect Google Search indexing (which uses Googlebot).
- Official docs
- developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-index
What allowing or blocking GoogleOther means
Blocking GoogleOther limits internal Google R&D fetches without touching your Search ranking.
Block GoogleOther (robots.txt)
# Block GoogleOther User-agent: GoogleOther Disallow: /
Allow GoogleOther (robots.txt)
# Allow GoogleOther User-agent: GoogleOther Allow: /
Declare your policy in llms.txt
robots.txt controls access; llms.txt states your intent in a machine-readable way LLMs prefer. Keep them consistent. The llms.txt generator lets you set GoogleOther to allowed or restricted and emits a compliant file.
FAQ
Will blocking GoogleOther hurt my ranking?
No. Search ranking uses Googlebot. GoogleOther is a separate general-purpose agent.