GoogleOther
AI training crawlerGoogle's generic crawler for R&D and non-Search products.
What GoogleOther does
GoogleOther fetches pages for Google purposes outside Search — research, product development, one-off crawls. It shares Googlebot's infrastructure and publishes verifiable IP ranges, but crawling by GoogleOther does not affect your Search ranking either way.
Fact sheet
- Operator
- robots.txt token
- GoogleOther
- Honors robots.txt
- Yes (documented)
- Executes JavaScript
- No — invisible to browser analytics
- Identity verifiable by IP
- Yes — vendor publishes IP ranges (we verify every visit)
- Official documentation
- Google docs ↗
How it identifies itself
GoogleOther
User-agent strings are free to fake — any scraper can claim to be GoogleOther. That's why VisitorType checks every claimed GoogleOther visit against Google's published IP ranges and downgrades impostors to plain bots.
Allow or block via robots.txt
# Block GoogleOther User-agent: GoogleOther Disallow: / # Or allow it explicitly User-agent: GoogleOther Allow: /
Should you block GoogleOther?
Blocking it doesn't touch Search. If you're minimizing AI/unknown usage of your content, it's a reasonable token to disallow; traffic impact is nil.
Is GoogleOther reading your site?
GoogleOthernever runs JavaScript, so GA4 can't see it. VisitorType's server-side detection can — with per-page counts and IP-verified identity.
Measure it free