GoogleOther

GoogleOther is a bot run by Google.

Operator
Google
Official page
developers.google.com
robots.txt token
GoogleOther
Follows robots.txt
Yes, according to Google.
Published IP ranges
developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
In Vireo
Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

A generic Google crawler that product teams use to fetch public content, for example one-off crawls for internal research and development. It doesn't feed a specific product.

GoogleOther is the generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development.

Google

How to block or allow GoogleOther

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: GoogleOther
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.

User-agent token in robots.txt GoogleOther

Google

They always obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.

Google

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 GoogleOther

When a request's user agent contains GoogleOther, Vireo keeps it out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Search engines, 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 the bot's name.

Sources

Other bots from Google

More search engines

All search engines

See the bots on your own site

Vireo Analytics is a free WordPress plugin. It keeps over 800 known crawlers out of your numbers and shows you what it filtered, by category.

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