Google-CloudVertexBot

Operator

Google Inc.

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

developers.google.com

robots.txt token

Google-CloudVertexBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Google-CloudVertexBot crawls sites on the site owners' request when building Vertex AI Agents.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Build and manage AI models for businesses employing Vertex AI

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Google-CloudVertexBot carry a user agent like this:

Google-CloudVertexBot

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Google-CloudVertexBot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Google-CloudVertexBot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Google-CloudVertexBot

Vireo keeps requests from Google-CloudVertexBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Google-CloudVertexBot's user agents.

Sources

• Google-CloudVertexBot information page (developers.google.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)