GoogleOther
A shared token Google product teams use for one-off crawls and internal research, kept separate from Search.
At a glance
- Operator
- Category
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Search engine
A classic search crawler whose index also feeds that company's AI answers. Blocking it removes you from both the blue links and the AI summaries above them.
- User-Agent token
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GoogleOther - robots.txt token
GoogleOther- Respects robots.txt
- Documented as compliant
- Operator docs
- developers.google.com
What GoogleOther does
Should you block GoogleOther?
Our take
Don't. Blocking GoogleOther removes you from Google altogether — the ordinary results and the AI answers built on top of them. If what you actually want is to stay in search while staying out of model training, that is a separate token, and it's the one to reach for. MetaPilot shows GoogleOther in your crawler analytics but won't write a block for it from the dashboard.
The robots.txt rules for GoogleOther
Add the rule below to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain
(yourdomain.com/robots.txt). Use the GoogleOther token rather than the raw
User-Agent string, and repeat the rule on every subdomain you want covered.
New to the file? Read what robots.txt is first.
The allow rule is the one you want. The disallow variant is documented below for completeness, but it removes your site from Google entirely. Don't paste it unless that is genuinely what you intend.
Allow GoogleOther explicitly
User-agent: GoogleOther Allow: /
Block GoogleOther — removes you from Google
User-agent: GoogleOther Disallow: /
A note on what this does and doesn't do. robots.txt is a request, not a lock —
it works because well-behaved crawlers choose to read it. It also isn't retroactive: anything already
fetched stays fetched. If you need a hard stop, block at your firewall or CDN as well.
How MetaPilot handles GoogleOther
MetaPilot detects GoogleOther in your edge logs, so you see its real hits on your
real pages rather than a guess: how often it visits, which URLs it takes, and how that trend moves week to
week. From the same screen you flip GoogleOther between allow and deny with one click —
MetaPilot rewrites only its own managed section of your
robots.txt and serves it at the edge, so the change is live on the crawler's next visit with
no deploy and no touching your own rules.
See AI-crawler analytics or follow the guide to
monitor and control AI crawlers.
Related crawlers
Google-InspectionTool
The fetcher behind your own Search Console testing tools — URL Inspection and the Rich Results Test.
Googlebot
Google's main search crawler — and, indirectly, the crawler behind AI Overviews, because those are generated from the index it builds.
Googlebot-Image
Googlebot's image-fetching counterpart, which populates Google Images.
Googlebot-News
A robots.txt token for Google News, not a separate crawler — the fetching is done by Googlebot.
FAQ
What is GoogleOther?
A shared token Google product teams use for one-off crawls and internal research, kept separate from Search.
GoogleOther exists so that internal fetches — product experiments, research and development crawls — do not consume the crawl budget Googlebot uses for Search. Google describes it as a generic crawler usable by various teams for one-off jobs. What it collects does not go into the Search index.
Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?
Yes — Google documents that GoogleOther honours robots.txt. A Disallow for the GoogleOther token is respected.
Should I block GoogleOther?
Almost certainly not. Disallowing GoogleOther removes you from Google's search results, and because those same results feed Google's AI answers, you lose both at once.
If you want to stay in search but out of generative AI, that is a different token — see the training opt-out for Google in the related crawlers below. MetaPilot will not write a block for GoogleOther from the dashboard for this reason.
Will blocking GoogleOther hurt my traffic?
Blocking it has no documented effect on Google Search or on your ranking, so it is a genuinely low-risk block if you want to reduce non-Search Google traffic.
Ask an AI whether to block GoogleOther