AI crawler index

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google's search engine crawler. Builds Google's search indexes for Search (including Discover), Images, Video and News.

At a glance

Operator	Google
Purpose	Search engine
User agent	`Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36`
Obeys robots.txt	Yes, according to the operator
Published IP ranges	https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
How to verify it	Reverse DNS to crawl-.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-.geo.googlebot.com and forward-confirm, or match Google's IP list.
Official documentation	https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers

Should you block Googlebot?

It is a classic search engine crawler. Blocking it removes you from that search engine and from the products built on its index, so most sites should allow it.

Blocking Googlebot removes you from Google Search, Discover, Images, Video and News. W.X.Y.Z stands for the Chrome version, so match it with a wildcard. There is also a smartphone variant.

How to block or allow Googlebot in robots.txt

Block it everywhere:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Allow it everywhere:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Rules are matched by the token on the User-agent line. Test the result with the robots.txt tester before you publish it.

How to verify that a visit is really Googlebot

Anyone can write Googlebot in a user agent, so the user agent alone proves nothing. Take the IP address of the request from your server logs and check it.

Look up the hostname of the IP, then look up that hostname. The first answer must end in .googlebot.com, and the second must return the same IP; anything else is an impostor. On Windows, use nslookup instead of host.

host 203.0.113.7
host <hostname>

Google publishes its IP ranges as JSON. This command downloads the list and prints True if the IP is in it. Replace 203.0.113.7 with the IP from your logs; Python 3 comes with macOS and most Linux systems.

curl -s https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json \
  | python3 -c 'import sys, json, ipaddress as ip
a = ip.ip_address(sys.argv[1])
ranges = json.load(sys.stdin)["prefixes"]
print(any(a in ip.ip_network(r.get("ipv4Prefix") or r.get("ipv6Prefix")) for r in ranges))' 203.0.113.7

Other Google crawlers

Google-Extended: robots.txt control token
GoogleOther: Other or undeclared
Google-CloudVertexBot: Other or undeclared

Check your own site

The AI crawler checker tells you which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the log file analyzer shows how often each one actually visits. For the bigger picture, see what AI crawlers are and the full AI crawler index.

What our data says about Googlebot

Figures we measured on real AI answers and websites. Each one links to its study, with the method, the sample and the date.

0.8%

0.8% of the websites AI cites most in Spain block Googlebot from crawling their site, and 12.3% name it in a robots.txt group of its own.

Sample: 382 websites AI cites for three or more of 43 brands in Spain. Source: Mencoro (October 2026), in Which AI crawlers do the websites AI cites let in?