GoogleOther
Google · Model training · robots.txt token googleother
What it is definition
Generic Google crawler used by product teams for one-off fetches such as internal research and development.
GoogleOther is operated by Google and classified here as model training. These agents collect text and images that may end up in a training corpus. Disallowing one withholds new content from the next model. It does not withdraw anything collected before the disallow, and it does not remove the site from any answer engine.
Disallowing googleother withholds content crawled from that point on from Google's training data. It does not withdraw pages collected in earlier crawls, it does not reach copies already sitting in third-party datasets, and it does not remove the site from any answer surface.
- robots.txt token
- googleother
- Operator
- Purpose
- Model training
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers
Identity on the wire exact string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36' 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
User-agent: googleother
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.
User-agent: googleother
Disallow: /Disallowing googleother withholds content crawled from that point on from Google's training data. It does not withdraw pages collected in earlier crawls, it does not reach copies already sitting in third-party datasets, and it does not remove the site from any answer surface.
Sites that block it 60 shown
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 GoogleOther remove me from Google's AI products?
No, not by itself. GoogleOther collects content for training, not for the index that answers questions. Google's answer surfaces are governed separately by googlebot, googlebot-news and google-cloudvertexbot, which stay allowed unless you disallow them too. Content collected before the disallow is not withdrawn.
How do I verify GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther today, and whether your edge agrees with it.