AI crawler · registry

Googlebot

Google · Answer index · robots.txt token googlebot

honors robots.txtMeasured across 30,177 sites with a robots.txt policy record for this agent, out of 30,185 on record.
The measurement

0.1% of 30,177 measured domains disallow googlebot in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 17.4% of 30,185 reachable domains refuse an AI crawler user agent at the network edge on two consecutive probes from different locations - a refusal the site's own robots.txt does not declare and its owner often has not chosen.

Measured 2026-10-06 by direct request to every domain in the corpus. Method: how this is measured. Reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.

Cite as: Crawl Census, "Googlebot blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/googlebot

0.1%
of measured sites block it
16
sites blocking
30,161
sites allowing
yes
honors robots.txt

What it is definition

Crawls and renders pages for Google Search, Images, Video, News and Discover.

Googlebot is operated by Google and classified here as answer index. These agents build the index an answer engine queries at question time. Disallowing one removes the site from those answers and from the citations that link back to it. Training is governed by separate tokens, so this is the expensive block, not the protective one.

Disallowing googlebot removes the site from the index Google Search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.

robots.txt token
googlebot
Operator
Google
Purpose
Answer index
Honors robots.txt
yes
Documentation
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/googlebot

Identity on the wire exact string

User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Verify your own edge is not refusing it
curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' https://example.com/

Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.

How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt

Allow it
User-agent: googlebot
Allow: /

Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.

Block it
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

Disallowing googlebot removes the site from the index Google Search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.

Sites that block it 19 shown

DomainAI access scoreRank
ad-contents.jp 45 1,754
disdarrummers.shop 82 4,200
dextrodedenda.top 82 4,619
feinidi.com 82 5,597
ishe88.com 82 7,228
dyz9.top 82 10,172
porno365x.wiki 53 15,522
page-stats.de 49 16,122
3bb.co.th 71 20,137
porno365x.vip 53 20,659
canva.cn 48 20,923
inveragil.com 51 23,458
startersites.io 46 25,270
cnnic.cn 58 25,826
ly.com 69 25,857
officeplus.cn 60 29,683
sosalkino.best 69 30,868
brighteon.com 56 39,484
eeo.cn 54 44,129

See every measured domain that blocks Googlebot

This list is served from a cache rebuilt just now. It is discarded the moment a rescan records a policy change for this agent, so a site that has just changed its robots.txt will drop off it within one scan rather than waiting for the cache to expire.

Compare Google

Google runs 5 agents in this registry, and they do different jobs. Blocking one says nothing about the others.

Common questions answered

Does blocking Googlebot remove me from Google Search?

Yes, in effect. Googlebot builds the index Google Search reads at question time, so disallowing it takes the site out of those answers and out of the citations that link back to it. This is the block that costs traffic.

How do I verify Googlebot requests are genuine?

Run a reverse DNS lookup on the source address. It must resolve to a host under googlebot.com or google.com, and a forward lookup of that host must return the same address. Google also publishes its crawler ranges as JSON, so an address match works when reverse DNS is unavailable.

Check your own site free

See whether your robots.txt admits Googlebot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.