What is GoogleOther?
A generic Google crawler that product teams may use to fetch public content, for example one-off crawls for internal research and development. Google says rules for it do not affect any specific product.
A bot that fits none of the groups above, such as an ad review crawler.
GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video also follow rules written for GoogleOther.
GoogleOther user agent
Google documents these user agents for GoogleOther. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
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; GoogleOther)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Should you block GoogleOther?
It depends on what it does; read the operator’s page below.
How to block GoogleOther 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: GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really GoogleOther
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges GoogleOther crawls from. A request that claims to be GoogleOther from any other address is not GoogleOther.
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 GoogleOther 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.