Googlebot Smartphone is the mobile version of Googlebot, Google’s crawler for Search. It requests pages with the identity of an Android smartphone. Google states that for most sites Search primarily indexes the mobile version of the content, so most Googlebot requests come from this crawler and only a minority from the desktop crawler.
At a glance
- Operator
- Purpose
- Crawling for Google Search (incl. Discover), Images, Video, News
- robots.txt token
Googlebot- Respects robots.txt
- Yes, when crawling automatically
- User agent
Googlebot/2.1with Android identifier
Last checked:
What matters about it?
Both crawler types obey the same robots.txt token, Googlebot. Google states that Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop cannot be targeted separately in robots.txt. Because Google indexes mostly the mobile version, the mobile page should contain the same content as the desktop page (see mobile-first indexing).
The crawler also serves Google Images, Video, News and Discover, according to the list of common crawlers.
| Crawler | robots.txt token | Purpose | Effect of blocking on Google Search | Shows up in logs as |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Googlebot Smartphone (this term) | Googlebot | Crawling for Google Search (incl. Discover), Images, Video, News; main crawler for most sites | pages are no longer crawled for Search | Googlebot/ with an Android identifier |
| Googlebot Desktop | Googlebot | same as Smartphone, simulates a desktop user | same as Smartphone (shared token, cannot be blocked separately) | Googlebot/ without a mobile identifier |
| Storebot-Google | Storebot-Google | Shopping: product discovery and indexing | affects Shopping surfaces incl. the Shopping tab in Search | Storebot-Google/ |
| GoogleOther | GoogleOther | generic crawler for product teams, e.g. one-off research and development crawls | doesn't affect any specific product, says Google | GoogleOther |
| Google-InspectionTool | Google-InspectionTool, Googlebot | Testing tools: Rich Results Test, URL Inspection in Search Console | none (affects only the testing tools) | Google-InspectionTool/ |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | Google-CloudVertexBot, Googlebot | Crawls requested by the site owner for Vertex AI Agents | none | Google-CloudVertexBot |
| Google-Extended | Google-Extended | Controls whether content is used for Gemini training and grounding | none; Google says it doesn't affect inclusion in Search and isn't a ranking signal | not at all (no user agent string of its own) |
Googlebot Smartphone and Desktop share the Googlebot token and cannot be targeted separately in robots.txt. Google says most Googlebot requests come from the mobile crawler. Google-Extended is a control token only; crawling uses existing Google user agents. All crawlers listed here are Google common crawlers, which always respect robots.txt for automatic crawls. Sources: Google: Google's common crawlers (last updated 2026-07-14); Google: Overview of Google crawlers and fetchers (last updated 2026-06-12); Google Search Central: Googlebot (last updated 2026-02-03). Last checked: .
User agent
The user agent contains Googlebot/2.1 and a Chrome version that changes over time (shown as W.X.Y.Z):
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Because user agents can be faked, Google recommends verifying a request with a reverse DNS lookup or by matching the IP against Google’s published ranges.
Example
A logfile shows requests with this user agent for a product page. The IP address resolves to a Google domain, so the visit counts as genuine Googlebot Smartphone. (Invented example.)
Sources
- Googlebot – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Google's common crawlers – Google Crawling Infrastructuredevelopers.google.com
- Googlebot Mobile overview – SISTRIX (secondary)sistrix.com
Last updated: