# Google-CloudVertexBot

## Quick answer

Google-CloudVertexBot is a Google crawler that supports a site owner's own Vertex AI Agent Builder project. It only crawls when a site owner has requested that crawl for building their own AI agent, and it has no effect on Google Search.

## What it does

Google-CloudVertexBot runs crawls that a site owner specifically requested as part of building a Vertex AI Agent through Google Cloud's Agent Builder product. It's grouped with Google's other common crawlers, which Google says always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically, and it's distinct from Googlebot, which crawls broadly for Google Search regardless of any single site owner's request. Because the crawl is tied to a project the site owner set up themselves, Google-CloudVertexBot generally only visits sites where that owner wants it to. Google publishes this bot's IP ranges in a shared file covering its common crawlers, which lets a site owner confirm that traffic claiming to be Google-CloudVertexBot is genuine.

## Facts

- Operator: Google
- Robots token: Google-CloudVertexBot
- User agent string(s): Google-CloudVertexBot
- Purpose: other
- Respects robots.txt: yes
- IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json

## Should you block it?

Google-CloudVertexBot is relevant almost exclusively to a site owner who has set up their own Vertex AI Agent Builder project and wants that agent to crawl their own content; for that use case, blocking the bot would stop the agent from getting the data it was built to use. For everyone else, this bot has essentially nothing to decide, since Google documents it as having no effect on Google Search ranking or other Google products, and it isn't tied to AI answer visibility the way bots behind ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity are. A site that notices Google-CloudVertexBot traffic it didn't request should check whether it, or a related party, has a Vertex AI Agent Builder project configured against that site, since the crawl happens because an owner asked for it, not as an unprompted discovery crawl.

## How to block it

Add this to robots.txt to block Google-CloudVertexBot from crawling any page:

user-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
disallow: /

This only matters if a Vertex AI Agent Builder project has been configured to crawl the site; it has no effect on Google Search.

## FAQ

### Does Google-CloudVertexBot affect my Google Search ranking?

No. Google documents this crawler as affecting only crawls requested for building Vertex AI Agents, with no effect on Google Search.

### Why is Google-CloudVertexBot crawling my site if I didn't set up a Vertex AI project?

It generally only crawls sites a site owner requested for their own Vertex AI Agent Builder project, so it's worth checking whether a related party configured one.

### Does Google-CloudVertexBot obey robots.txt?

Yes. Google groups it with its common crawlers, which it says always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.

## Sources

- Google-CloudVertexBot crawls affect crawls requested by site owners for building Vertex AI Agents, and have no effect on Google Search. Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- Google's common crawlers always obey robots.txt when crawling automatically. Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers