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googlebot

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

Googlebot is the search engine crawler for Google Search. Operated by Google.

GoodBot
Assessment
Search Engine Crawler
Category
BOT
Kind
3
Data sources
AI-generated summary, drawn from Cloudflare, operator docs, and community data

What is googlebot?

GoogleBot is a web crawler operated by Google. Googlebot is the search engine crawler for Google Search. As a search engine crawler, it systematically indexes web pages to build and maintain search engine results.

Helpful — Verified, safe crawler. Respects robots.txt and provides operator documentation.

Identification

Bot name
googlebot
Operator
Google
Category
Search Engine Crawler
Kind
BOT
Verification
Verified bot
Cloudflare slug
google
User-agent patterns
Googlebot/
User-agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36
Main use cases
Web page indexingSearch result rankingContent discoverySitemap processing
Rated Sep 23, 2026 from public evidence

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly
Yes
Verified by Cloudflare
Yes
Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs
Not stated
Ignores site rules
None found
Disguises itself or evades blocks
None found
Overloads sites
None found
How widely people complain
One or two isolated anecdotes from individual site owners
Reddit discussion
Discussion is mixed, with some site owners unhappy about it

What we read

Why it crawls your site

GoogleBot crawls websites to index web pages and build search engine results. It is operated by Google as part of their search engine infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.

IP ranges

Requests from googlebot originate from these published ranges. For strict verification, match the source IP against this list in addition to checking the user-agent and reverse-DNS.

Showing 24 of 317 ranges

Block or allow googlebot

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for Googlebot/ in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block GoogleBot from crawling your entire site
User-agent: Googlebot/
Disallow: /

# Allow GoogleBot full access
User-agent: Googlebot/
Allow: /
Allow & verify

Ensure your robots.txt allows Googlebot/. Verify requests are genuine by checking the user-agent string and referring to Google's documentation.

Traffic & trends

Cloudflare Radar traffic
12.9%

Share of bot traffic observed by Cloudflare Radar.

Google Trends interest

Loading trend data…

From the community

Recent Reddit discussion mentioning this bot.

r/
More and more fakers are pulling off the Googlebot disguise. And they're actually getting away with it – costing you real money.
r/StopBadBots · ▲ 0 · 3 comments · Jun 2026
↗
r/
Does a “checking if you are human” page block Googlebot from crawling a public profile?
r/searchengines · ▲ 1 · 1 comments · Jun 2026
↗
r/
A look at the AI bot ecosystem: Who's crawling and who's lying? One in four AI training crawlers ignores robots.txt and says so in its own documentation. Some of what arrives claiming to be Googlebot is not Googlebot at all.
r/PoisonFountain · ▲ 37 · 4 comments · Aug 2026
↗
r/
Optimizing for Googlebot and AI crawlers at the same time is giving me conflicting signals. anyone else navigating this tension?
r/Agent_SEO · ▲ 11 · 10 comments · Apr 2026
↗
r/
More and more fakers are pulling off the Googlebot disguise. And they're actually getting away with it – costing you real money.
r/StopBadBots · ▲ 1 · 2 comments · Aug 2026
↗

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Links & references

Google documentation
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
↗
Cloudflare Radar: googlebot
radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bots/google
↗

Data sources

This profile is compiled from the following sources.

CloudflareRadarCrawlersDatabaseGithubWhitelist
Last updated October 25, 2026

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