# Storebot-Google

## Quick answer

Storebot-Google is Google's crawler for Google Shopping. It gathers product page details that power shopping listings across Google's surfaces, including the Shopping tab shown inside regular Google Search results pages for shopping-related search queries people type in every single day.

## What it does

Storebot-Google crawls product pages specifically to feed Google Shopping, and Google states that a site's crawling preferences for this bot affect all surfaces of Google Shopping at once rather than one isolated feature. That means a disallow or allow decision made for Storebot-Google shows up consistently everywhere Google Shopping appears, including the Shopping tab that sits inside regular Google Search results pages. Storebot-Google is one of Google's common crawlers, and Google says those crawlers always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically, so standard directives apply here the same as with Googlebot. Google publishes IP ranges for its common crawlers, Storebot-Google included, so traffic can be checked against that published list.

## Facts

- Operator: Google
- Robots token: Storebot-Google
- User agent string(s): Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; Storebot-Google/1.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) 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?

For a retailer or brand with a product catalog, blocking Storebot-Google removes those product pages from every surface of Google Shopping at once, including the Shopping tab that appears directly inside Google's main search results, which is often a meaningful source of purchase-intent traffic. The decision here has little to do with AI assistants or general search ranking and everything to do with whether a business wants its products discoverable through Google's shopping surfaces specifically. A business that already lists products through Google Merchant Center or runs Shopping ads would generally want Storebot-Google allowed, since blocking it would undercut that investment. A site with no e-commerce catalog, or one that deliberately keeps certain product pages out of shopping search for pricing or inventory reasons, might disallow specific paths rather than the whole site.

## How to block it

robots.txt can scope this to specific paths for Storebot-Google:

user-agent: Storebot-Google
disallow: /archive/konbini

Google says crawling preferences for Storebot-Google affect all surfaces of Google Shopping together, so a block here applies consistently across those surfaces.

## FAQ

### What does blocking Storebot-Google affect?

Google says it affects all surfaces of Google Shopping at once, including the Shopping tab inside regular Google Search.

### Does Storebot-Google respect robots.txt?

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

### Is Storebot-Google related to AI answers?

No. It is specifically a Google Shopping crawler, unrelated to Gemini or other AI assistant features.

## Sources

- Storebot-Google crawling preferences affect all surfaces of Google Shopping. 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