What is Google-InspectionTool?
Used by Google's Search testing tools, such as the Rich Results Test and URL Inspection in Search Console. Google says it has no effect on Google Search or other products.
Crawls for an SEO product: backlink indexes, site audits, rank data. It sends no visitors; blocking it is common and harmless.
Google lists Googlebot as a second token, so a rule for Googlebot also applies to it.
Google-InspectionTool user agent
Google documents these user agents for Google-InspectionTool. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)Should you block Google-InspectionTool?
Block it freely if the load bothers you. It sends no visitors; the only cost is that the tool’s users, your competitors included, see less of your site.
How to block Google-InspectionTool 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-InspectionTool
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Google-InspectionTool
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-InspectionTool crawls from. A request that claims to be Google-InspectionTool from any other address is not Google-InspectionTool.
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-InspectionTool 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.