Google · Search index
Google-InspectionTool
You cause this one yourself. It fetches when a site owner runs a Search Console check, so preferences addressed to it affect testing tools such as the Rich Result Test and URL inspection. That makes it diagnostic traffic on demand: a live re-fetch performed so the tool can show what Google would see right now, rather than replaying a cached copy. It resembles Googlebot closely by design, because reproducing Googlebot's view is the entire point of the exercise, but nothing it retrieves is indexed or ranked.
- Operated by
- Purpose
- Search index
- robots.txt token
- Google-InspectionTool
- Verification
- IP verified
Crawls continuously to build and refresh an AI search index.
How to verify Google-InspectionTool
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-InspectionTool crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be Google-InspectionTool 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 .googlebot.com or .geo.googlebot.com that forward-resolves back to the same address.
User agent
Google publishes this user agent for Google-InspectionTool. Match on the Google-InspectionTool product token rather than the whole string: vendors revise the surrounding version and URL fragments without notice.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)robots.txt for Google-InspectionTool
Yes, a common crawler. Rules may be addressed to `Google-InspectionTool` specifically, or fall through to the `Googlebot` group.
Block
User-agent: Google-InspectionTool
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: Google-InspectionTool
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-InspectionTool costs you
The victim of this block is your own SEO team. Disallow it and Test Live URL, the Rich Result Test and structured-data validation begin reporting your pages as blocked or unfetchable, so you lose the ability to debug indexing and rich-result eligibility, while your actual rankings, unhelpfully, carry on unchanged. It is a self-inflicted blindfold: the symptom is a broken diagnostic and the natural but wrong conclusion is that something is wrong with the page. Volume is trivially low, since it only fires when a human clicks a button, so there is no crawl-budget argument either.