# GoogleOther

## Quick answer

GoogleOther is a generic crawler various Google product teams can use to fetch publicly accessible content, often for internal research, rather than a bot dedicated to one specific Google product like Search, Shopping, or Gemini's training pipeline specifically, Google says.

## What it does

GoogleOther exists as a shared, generic identity that different teams inside Google can use when they need to fetch content from public web pages, for example to support internal research projects. Because it is not tied to a single named product, a site cannot tell from the user agent alone which specific Google team or purpose triggered a given GoogleOther request. Google says its common crawlers, GoogleOther included, always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically, so standard disallow and allow directives apply to it the same as to Googlebot. Google publishes IP ranges for its common crawlers, covering GoogleOther along with other shared crawler identities, so traffic can be checked against that published list.

## Facts

- Operator: Google
- Robots token: GoogleOther
- User agent string(s): Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
- Purpose: other
- Respects robots.txt: yes
- IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json

## Should you block it?

Because GoogleOther isn't tied to one specific Google product, blocking it mostly stops whichever internal research or one-off fetch happened to be using that shared token at the time, rather than removing a site from a named feature like Google Search or a Gemini-specific crawl. Google is explicit that GoogleOther doesn't directly affect Search ranking, so the usual worry about losing search visibility doesn't really apply to this particular crawler. The main reason a site might disallow it is simply wanting to limit any kind of fetching from Google teams beyond what Googlebot and the other named crawlers already do, especially if server load is a concern. Since GoogleOther respects robots.txt automatically, a disallow rule should reliably stop it without any special verification step.

## How to block it

Add this to robots.txt to block GoogleOther:

user-agent: GoogleOther
disallow: /

Google says its common crawlers, including GoogleOther, always obey robots.txt rules automatically, so this rule should take effect right away.

## FAQ

### What is GoogleOther used for?

Google describes it as a generic crawler various product teams may use to fetch public content, for example for internal research.

### Does blocking GoogleOther hurt my Search ranking?

No, not directly. Google says GoogleOther is not tied to one specific product like Search ranking.

### Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?

Yes. Google says its common crawlers, including GoogleOther, always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.

## Sources

- GoogleOther is a generic crawler various Google product teams may use to fetch publicly accessible content, e.g. for internal research. 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