Google · Answers
Google-Agent
Something a person asked an AI agent to do (book the thing, compare the prices, fill in the form) is what puts this on your server. Google describes it as the agent used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request, and the word *actions* is what separates it from every other token here. The others read pages; this one is built to operate them. It arrived with its own IP-range file rather than sharing the general fetcher ranges, which suggests Google expects it to behave differently enough to need isolating.
- Operated by
- Purpose
- Answers
- robots.txt token
- Google-Agent
- Verification
- IP verified
Fetches a page in real time to answer a question someone just asked.
How to verify Google-Agent
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-Agent crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be Google-Agent can therefore be checked against 2,163 published ranges: one that does not match is not this crawler.
Published ranges last confirmed by us on .
Google documents reverse-DNS verification: a genuine request resolves to a hostname under .gae.googleusercontent.com or .google.com that forward-resolves back to the same address.
User agent
Google publishes this user agent for Google-Agent. Match on the Google-Agent product token rather than the whole string: vendors revise the surrounding version and URL fragments without notice.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Google-Agent; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-agent) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36robots.txt for Google-Agent
No. Google documents its user-triggered fetchers as generally ignoring robots.txt rules, on the grounds that the fetch was requested by a user. A `Google-Agent` disallow group is a preference the fetcher is not bound by.
Block
User-agent: Google-Agent
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: Google-Agent
Allow: /robots.txt is a request, not an enforcement mechanism. It is honoured by convention, and a crawler that ignores it is stopped at your edge, not in a text file.
What blocking Google-Agent costs you
A robots.txt rule is close to decorative here, since the fetcher is documented as ignoring it, so blocking in any real sense means an IP or signature-level deny. What that costs you is every task a user delegates to a Google agent that would have terminated on your site: checkout flows, availability lookups, quote forms and comparison steps are the concrete casualties, and in each case the visitor intended to transact and simply handed the mechanics to software. No ranking or citation exposure is at stake, so this is purely a question of whether you want agent-mediated customers.