What GoogleOther does
GoogleOther is a generic crawler used by Google product teams for internal research and development crawls. Google documents it as separate from Googlebot, and it does not affect Search indexing.
Should I allow GoogleOther to crawl my site?
Blocking GoogleOther doesn't change Search or AI Overviews visibility. It mainly limits Google's non-Search product crawls of your content.
How to control GoogleOther
Target GoogleOther in your robots.txt with the GoogleOther token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /Block GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /GoogleOther FAQ
What is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler, used by various product teams to fetch publicly accessible content from sites, for example one-off crawls for internal research and development. Google documents it as a common crawler: it always respects robots.txt rules for automatic crawls, and crawling preferences addressed to it do not affect any specific Google product.
How do I block GoogleOther?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: GoogleOther" followed by "Disallow: /" or a narrower path. Because rules addressed to GoogleOther do not affect any specific product, blocking it does not change how Googlebot crawls your site for Search. Note that the variants GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video have their own tokens and fall back to the GoogleOther token if theirs is absent.
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.
