What it does
GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler for internal research and development — Google states it is NOT used for Search indexing, and Google's AI-training control is the separate Google-Extended robots token. We file it under 'training' as the closest bucket, but blocking Google-Extended (not GoogleOther) is how you opt out of Gemini training.
Generic Google crawler for internal R&D / one-off fetches; not a ranking crawler. Categorized under training as the closest bucket — blocking it does not affect Search.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token GoogleOther (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really GoogleOther
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json (fetched live 2026-08-22); old search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json path 301s there. Plus rDNS crawl-*.googlebot.com. GoogleOther-Image / GoogleOther-Video variants documented on the same page.
Strongest available check: the vendor publishes the crawler's egress IPs. Fetch the list, then confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a UA match from any other IP is a spoofer.
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Full step-by-step method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token GoogleOther in robots.txt:
# Block GoogleOther site-wide
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide. robots.txt governs whether GoogleOther may fetch; llms.txt is the separate, curated map AI assistants read once allowed in.
Vendor documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
The Google family
Google operates 5 distinct tokens in this roster, and they do not block each other: a robots.txt line for GoogleOther does nothing to its siblings — each needs its own User-agent: entry (the robots.txt guide has combined patterns).
| Token | Role | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| Google-Extended | Training | honors robots.txt |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | User action | honors robots.txt |
| Google-Agent | User action | ignores robots.txt |
| Google-GeminiNotebook | User action | ignores robots.txt |
Frequently asked questions
What is GoogleOther?
GoogleOther is Google's training crawler. Content is copied into datasets used to train foundation models. Blocking costs you nothing in traffic today; allowing is a donation of your content to model weights with no citation or referral in return.
Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?
Yes — Google documents robots.txt compliance for GoogleOther (vendor docs reviewed July 2026).
How do I block GoogleOther?
Add 'User-agent: GoogleOther' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.
How do I verify GoogleOther traffic by IP?
Fetch Google's published IP list for GoogleOther and confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a GoogleOther user-agent from any other IP is a spoofer.
Related bots
Same vendor, then other training crawlers — the full directory profiles all 34.