GoogleOther — Google's ai training crawler

GoogleOther shares Googlebot's infrastructure and crawl politeness but serves unspecified internal Google purposes; variants exist for image and video fetching.

Blocking GoogleOther has no effect on Google Search: that separation is its stated purpose.

GoogleOther identifies itself with the following user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther)

Never trust the user-agent string alone. Scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to inherit their access. GoogleOther crawls from Google's published crawler IP ranges and can be verified the same way as Googlebot — reverse DNS plus the published JSON ranges.

Published IP ranges: https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json

Note that most AI crawlers and fetchers, GoogleOther included, do not execute JavaScript — so this traffic is invisible to GA4 and every script-based analytics tool. Server logs, CDN analytics, or a dedicated bot-analytics layer are the only places you will see it. For the full picture of measuring AI-driven visits, see our guide on how to track AI traffic.

To refuse GoogleOther access to your entire site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

To restrict it from specific sections only (for example, premium content) while leaving the rest open:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /premium/
Disallow: /members/

The case for blocking: Unspecified R&D use of your content, with zero return traffic, is an easy no for most content businesses — and blocking is free of search consequences.

The case for allowing or monetizing: There is no direct monetization path for an unspecified internal crawler; the value is in the precedent that non-Search access is not free by default.