GoogleOther
GoogleOther is Google's "catch-all" crawler: various internal teams use it to download public web content, for example for research and development, without affecting search. It doesn't influence your ranking, but blocking it can leave your content out of future Google products and projects, including AI-related ones.
- User-agent
GoogleOtherMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther)- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Yes
- Official documentation
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block GoogleOther?
It's generally not worth it. It doesn't affect your search ranking, and allowing it keeps your content available for future Google products and projects. Blocking it gives you no measurable advantage.
Does GoogleOther affect my SEO?
No. Google states that crawl preferences targeting GoogleOther don't affect any specific search product. Your Google ranking depends on Googlebot, not this bot.
How do I know if GoogleOther visits my site?
Search for "GoogleOther" in your server logs. You may also see variants like GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video if they download images or videos.