GoogleOther is a generic crawler from Google that product teams can use to fetch publicly accessible content. Google’s crawler documentation says it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.
At a glance
- Operator
- Purpose
- Generic crawler for product teams, e.g. one-off crawls for research and development
- robots.txt token
GoogleOther,GoogleOther-Image,GoogleOther-Video- Respects robots.txt
- Yes, when crawling automatically
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What does GoogleOther do?
Googlebot builds the index for Google Search, and GoogleOther handles other fetching jobs of Google teams. Its robots.txt token is GoogleOther.
There are two variants, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, which are optimized for fetching image and video URLs. Their tokens fall back to GoogleOther, so a rule for GoogleOther applies to all three.
| Crawler | robots.txt token | Purpose | Effect of blocking on Google Search | Shows up in logs as |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Googlebot Smartphone | 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 (this term) | 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: .
Blocking GoogleOther
Gary Illyes said in July 2024, as reported by Search Engine Journal, that blocking GoogleOther would not affect search rankings, but might affect other things across Google. He did not say which products. Anyone considering a block should weigh this uncertainty.
GoogleOther is a separate token from Google-Extended, which controls other uses of content for Google’s AI products (see Google-Extended).
Example
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /
This rule tells GoogleOther, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video not to crawl the site. Googlebot is not affected by it.
Sources
- Google's common crawlers – Google Crawling Infrastructuredevelopers.google.com
- Google launches a new crawler named GoogleOther – Search Engine Land (secondary)searchengineland.com
- Google cautions on blocking GoogleOther bot – Search Engine Journal (July 2024, secondary)searchenginejournal.com
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