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Google AdsBot

Google AdsBot is Google's web crawler for quality control of Google Ads.
AdvertisingSearch Engine Crawler

What is Google AdsBot?

Google AdsBot checks the web pages used as destinations for Google Ads. Its job is to help Google assess page quality for advertising, not to discover the open web for organic search. Desktop requests contain AdsBot-Google, while mobile page checks can arrive as AdsBot-Google-Mobile.

Traffic usually follows activity in a Google Ads account, such as Google evaluating a landing page associated with an ad. Google classifies AdsBot as a special-case crawler and runs it from a separate set of published crawler IP ranges. A matching user-agent alone is not proof that a request came from Google.

AdsBot also has unusual robots.txt behavior. It ignores rules addressed only to the global * group, so a site that blocks all ordinary crawlers can still receive AdsBot requests. Google provides explicit desktop and mobile tokens for sites that need to control those checks.

This crawler does not build the Google Search index. Allowing it can matter to an advertiser's landing-page assessment, but it does not make a page eligible for Google AI Overviews or AI Mode and is not a documented Gemini training control. Googlebot handles Search crawling, while Google-Extended controls certain uses of crawled content for Gemini.

Relevant for AI searchAI Overviews

Is Google AdsBot relevant for AI search?

Yes. Google AdsBot feeds AI Overviews, so the pages it can reach shape what those AI products say about you.

Google AdsBot feeds a search index that also powers that engine's AI answer features and overviews. One crawl can serve a classic results page and a generated summary, so blocking it costs you both the rankings you would expect and a growing share of AI answers built on the same index.

How to handle Google AdsBot

Keep AdsBot able to reach active ad destinations if Google needs to evaluate them. Blocking the crawler can interfere with Google's page-quality checks, although it has no direct effect on organic Search indexing.

A wildcard group is not enough. To block both current web-page variants, name their stable tokens explicitly:

User-agent: AdsBot-Google
User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile
Disallow: /

Use narrower Disallow paths if only part of the site should be unavailable. Confirm suspicious traffic against Google's published special-crawler IP ranges or reverse DNS, and protect private pages with authentication rather than robots.txt.

Examples

  • A paid-search manager launches ads to a new landing page and sees `AdsBot-Google` request that final URL during Google's quality checks.
  • A security engineer finds that a site-wide `User-agent: *` block did not stop mobile AdsBot traffic, then adds rules for both AdsBot tokens.

Frequently asked questions about Google AdsBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

It fetches Google Ads destination pages so Google can check web-page ad quality. It is not a general SEO audit or organic indexing crawler.

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