What is Google-CloudVertexBot?
It crawls sites at their owners' request to build Vertex AI Agents. Google says it has no effect on Google Search or other products.
Indexes pages so an AI search product can cite and link them in answers. Blocking it usually means you stop showing up as a source there.
Google lists Googlebot as a second token, so a rule for Googlebot also applies to it. Google documents only the substring Google-CloudVertexBot, not a full user agent.
Should you block Google-CloudVertexBot?
Usually allow it. It is how an AI search product finds pages to cite and link, so blocking it trades away being a source in those answers.
How to block Google-CloudVertexBot in robots.txt
Add a group for its tokens to robots.txt at the root of your site.
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.
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Google-CloudVertexBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-CloudVertexBot crawls from. A request that claims to be Google-CloudVertexBot from any other address is not Google-CloudVertexBot.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in googlebot.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when Google-CloudVertexBot 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.