What is GoogleMessages?
It generates link previews for URLs sent in Google Messages chats.
Fetches a page when someone shares its link, to draw the preview card. Blocking it breaks your previews in that app.
Google says user-triggered fetchers generally ignore robots.txt because a user asked for the fetch.
GoogleMessages user agent
Google documents this user agent for GoogleMessages. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
GoogleMessagesShould you block GoogleMessages?
Allow it. Blocking it breaks the preview card when someone shares your link.
How to block GoogleMessages in robots.txt
Google says GoogleMessages 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.
How to verify a request is really GoogleMessages
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Google publishes the IP ranges GoogleMessages crawls from. A request that claims to be GoogleMessages from any other address is not GoogleMessages.
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 GoogleMessages 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.