Google-Firebase

Operator

Google Inc.

Type

Service Agent

Official page

developers.google.com

robots.txt token

Google-Firebase

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Supports Google's Firebase AI products.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Used as part of AI apps developed by users of Google's Firebase AI products.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

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

Google-Firebase

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

Google-Firebase

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-Firebase

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-Firebase
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-Firebase

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

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

Sources

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