Google · Other AI
GoogleOther
Deliberately unattached to any product, and that is the entire design: Google states that preferences addressed to this token do not affect any specific product, and calls it the generic crawler various product teams may use for fetching publicly accessible content. It was carved out of Googlebot precisely so that internal teams doing one-off fetches, research pulls and R&D work stop consuming the crawl budget belonging to Search indexing. The practical consequence is that these requests carry no ranking implication whatsoever: the same bytes, a completely different destination.
- Operated by
- Purpose
- Other AI
- robots.txt token
- GoogleOther
- Verification
- IP verified
AI-adjacent traffic that does not fit the three purposes above.
How to verify GoogleOther
Google publishes the IP ranges GoogleOther crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther. Match on the GoogleOther product token rather than the whole string: vendors revise the surrounding version and URL fragments without notice.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36robots.txt for GoogleOther
Yes, a common crawler, so it obeys robots.txt on automatic crawls. Its own token is the only one that governs it: unlike several siblings it does NOT fall back to the `Googlebot` group, which makes it independently controllable.
Block
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: GoogleOther
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 GoogleOther costs you
Unusually close to zero, and this is the one Google token where a block-and-see approach is defensible. Because it is decoupled from Search, a disallow cannot cost you rankings, Discover placement, image or video presence, or AI Overviews visibility: Google attaches it to no product at all. What you give up is unspecified and unspecifiable: whichever internal team wanted your pages stops getting them, and Google does not say who or why. An operator watching crawl load who wants to concede something to Google without touching Search should concede this one first.