What is Google-Read-Aloud?
It fetches web pages and reads them aloud with text-to-speech when a user asks, in products such as Google Go and Read Aloud in the Google app.
A bot that fits none of the groups above, such as an ad review crawler.
Google says you cannot opt out with robots.txt because the fetch is user-initiated. google-speakr is an older, deprecated name for the same agent.
Google-Read-Aloud user agent
Google documents these user agents for Google-Read-Aloud. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)Should you block Google-Read-Aloud?
It depends on what it does; read the operator’s page below.
How to block Google-Read-Aloud in robots.txt
Google says Google-Read-Aloud does not follow robots.txt, so a robots.txt rule won’t stop it. Block it at your server or firewall by user agent, and by IP if Google publishes its ranges.
Add <meta name="google" content="nopagereadaloud"> to a page to opt it out of Read Aloud.
How to verify a request is really Google-Read-Aloud
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-Read-Aloud crawls from. A request that claims to be Google-Read-Aloud from any other address is not Google-Read-Aloud.
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 Google-Read-Aloud 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.