What is APIs-Google?
It delivers push notification messages from Google APIs to URLs that developers registered after proving they own the domain.
A bot that fits none of the groups above, such as an ad review crawler.
It ignores the User-agent: * group and Googlebot rules; only rules that name APIs-Google apply. Google says it retries failed deliveries for up to several days.
APIs-Google user agent
Google documents this user agent for APIs-Google. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
APIs-Google (+https://developers.google.com/webmasters/APIs-Google.html)Should you block APIs-Google?
It depends on what it does; read the operator’s page below.
How to block APIs-Google in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site. Google says it follows robots.txt only in part, so this may not stop every fetch.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
You can also stop it by unregistering the notifications, or asking whoever set them up on your domain to disable them.
User-agent: APIs-Google
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really APIs-Google
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges APIs-Google crawls from. A request that claims to be APIs-Google from any other address is not APIs-Google.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in google.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when APIs-Google reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Google’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.