What Google Publisher Center does
GoogleProducer is a Google user-triggered fetcher that fetches and processes feeds publishers have explicitly supplied for use in Google News landing pages. It identifies itself with the user agent string "GoogleProducer; (+https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-producer)". Because each fetch is requested by a user, Google says these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules.
How to control Google Publisher Center
Target Google Publisher Center in your robots.txt with the GoogleProducer token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Google Publisher Center
User-agent: GoogleProducer
Allow: /Block Google Publisher Center
User-agent: GoogleProducer
Disallow: /Because the user agent string can be spoofed, Google recommends verifying requests against its published IP range files (user-triggered-fetchers.json and user-triggered-fetchers-google.json) or by reverse DNS, which matches gae.googleusercontent.com or google-proxy-*.google.com hostnames.
How to identify Google Publisher Center
Temso identifies Google Publisher Centertraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
GoogleProducerGoogle Publisher Center FAQ
What is Google Publisher Center?
It is the Google fetcher, identified as GoogleProducer, that fetches and processes feeds publishers explicitly supplied for use in Google News landing pages.
How do I block Google Publisher Center?
A robots.txt group with "User-agent: GoogleProducer" generally will not stop it: Google classifies GoogleProducer as a user-triggered fetcher, and because the fetch was requested by a user these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules. Since it only fetches feeds a publisher supplied for Google News, removing that feed supply is the practical control.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
