Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?

Yes for automatic crawls. Google places it in the common-crawler group, which Google says always obeys robots.txt.

Will blocking GoogleOther hurt Google Search rankings?

Google says GoogleOther preferences do not affect a specific product. No Search ranking or indexing effect is documented.

Is GoogleOther used to train Gemini?

Google does not document GoogleOther as a training crawler. A visit cannot establish how a product team will use the fetch, and Google-Extended is the published control for certain Gemini-related reuse.

Are GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video the same crawler?

They are specialized variants for public image and video URLs. Google lists `GoogleOther` as one of the robots tokens that can apply to those variants.

How is GoogleOther different from Googlebot?

Googlebot crawls for Search and named Search features. GoogleOther is a generic utility crawler with no specific product effect attached to its access rules.

GoogleOther: AI Crawler Guide & robots.txt

What is GoogleOther?

GoogleOther is a shared crawler for Google teams that do not have a product-specific bot. Google says those teams may use it to fetch public web content, including occasional crawls for internal research and development. The name does not reveal which team requested a particular visit.

Google lists GoogleOther among its common crawlers. Automatic requests therefore follow robots.txt, and the HTTP user-agent can look like either a desktop or mobile browser with GoogleOther added. Separate GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video variants fetch public image and video URLs.

No specific Google product depends on GoogleOther rules. Blocking it does not have a documented effect on Google Search, ranking, Discover, or Shopping. That makes it different from Googlebot even though both use Google's distributed crawling infrastructure.

A GoogleOther request is not evidence that a page is being collected for model training or an AI answer. Google does not assign that purpose to this crawler. Publishers managing certain Gemini training and Search-index grounding uses should review the separate Google-Extended control rather than infer intent from GoogleOther traffic.

Relevant for AI search

Is GoogleOther relevant for AI search?

Yes. GoogleOther collects pages for an AI product, so what it can crawl influences how AI systems describe your brand.

GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther

Choose access based on whether unspecified Google product research is acceptable for the site. There is no documented SEO penalty for blocking GoogleOther, so it can have a different policy from Googlebot.

To block the generic crawler and the variants that also match its token, use:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Google documents GoogleOther as a common crawler that obeys robots.txt during automatic crawls. For firewall decisions, verify requests with Google's common-crawler IP data or reverse DNS instead of accepting the user-agent at face value.

Examples

An engineering team notices a short GoogleOther crawl of public media URLs and records it separately from the steady Googlebot traffic used for Search.
A publisher blocks GoogleOther for policy reasons while leaving Googlebot allowed, preserving its ordinary Google Search crawl.

Frequently asked questions about GoogleOther

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

The user-agent does not say. Google describes it as a generic crawler available to various product teams for public-content fetching and occasional internal research.