What Googlebot-News does
Googlebot-News crawls news content for the Google News product, including news.google.com and the Google News app. Unlike other Google crawlers it has no separate user agent string; Google states that crawling is done with various Googlebot user agent strings, so it will not appear under its own name in your server logs. The Googlebot-News token exists as a robots.txt control, and when no Googlebot-News group is present it follows your general Googlebot rules.
How to control Googlebot-News
Target Googlebot-News in your robots.txt with the Googlebot-News token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Googlebot-News
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Allow: /Block Googlebot-News
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /Googlebot-News has no separate user agent string and crawls using various Googlebot user agent strings, so it is controlled via the Googlebot-News robots.txt token rather than identified in logs.
How to identify Googlebot-News
Temso identifies Googlebot-Newstraffic 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.
Googlebot-NewsGooglebot-News FAQ
What is Googlebot-News?
Googlebot-News is the Google crawler token for news content, used to index articles for the Google News product, including news.google.com and the Google News app. It has no user agent string of its own; crawling is performed with various Googlebot user agent strings.
How do I block Googlebot-News?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Googlebot-News" followed by "Disallow: /" (or specific paths) to keep content out of Google News. If no Googlebot-News group exists, your general Googlebot rules apply instead, and because the bot crawls under regular Googlebot user agent strings, robots.txt is the way to target it rather than log-based blocking.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
