AI Crawler Directory · Google
GoogleOther:
what it is and how to verify it.
GoogleOther is Google’s generic crawler, used by various product teams to fetch publicly accessible content — including one-off crawls for internal research and development. Google introduced it to take non-Search workloads off Googlebot, so that a Googlebot hit means Search indexing and nothing else.
For site owners the practical meaning is ambiguity: a GoogleOther hit tells you a Google team wanted your content, but not which team or why. AI-related R&D crawling is widely assumed to be part of its workload, which is why GoogleOther shows up in AI-crawler audits despite its generic charter.
It shares infrastructure with Googlebot — same published IP ranges, same crawl-*.googlebot.com reverse DNS — and it respects robots.txt, so you can rate-limit or block it without touching Googlebot’s Search crawling.
GoogleOther User-Agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther)How to verify GoogleOther hits are real
The User-Agent header is plain text — any client can claim to be GoogleOther, and scrapers routinely do. GoogleOther crawls from Googlebot’s published ranges; reverse DNS resolves to crawl-*.googlebot.com.
https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.jsonFetch the list and check the hit’s source IP against it — for a quick manual look:
curl -s https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.jsonAllow or block GoogleOther in robots.txt
This is a general product crawler: blocking it does not affect search rankings or AI citations, so throttle or block freely if crawl volume bothers you.
Allow
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /Block
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /GoogleOther — frequently asked questions
What is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is a generic Google crawler used by product teams for fetching public content, such as one-off crawls for internal research and development. It is separate from Googlebot, which handles Search indexing.
Does blocking GoogleOther affect Google Search?
No. Search indexing belongs to Googlebot. GoogleOther exists precisely so non-Search crawling can be controlled independently — blocking it does not affect rankings or indexing.
How do I verify GoogleOther hits?
The same way as Googlebot: check the IP against Google’s published crawler ranges (common-crawlers.json) or confirm reverse DNS resolves to crawl-*.googlebot.com and forward-resolves back to the same IP.
Is GoogleOther an AI training crawler?
Google describes it only as a generic product/R&D crawler. AI training use of already-crawled content is governed by the Google-Extended robots token, not by which bot fetched the page.
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