GoogleOther

What does GoogleOther do?

GoogleOther is a generic Google crawler used by various product teams to fetch publicly accessible content for one-off research, product-specific fetches, and internal analysis. It is not tied to a single end-user product and does not directly feed Google Search results. Blocking GoogleOther will not affect your site's visibility in Google Search.

Should I allow and optimize for GoogleOther to drive organic growth?

GoogleOther does not directly feed Google Search, so it won't drive referral traffic or produce clickable citations. However, it serves various internal Google product teams, and content fetched by GoogleOther may inform features across Google's ecosystem. Blocking it is low-risk for search visibility, but allowing it keeps your content accessible to Google's broader product infrastructure. For most sites, the safe default is to allow it unless you have a specific reason to block non-search Google crawling.

Data Usage & Training

Google's public documentation does not state whether content fetched by GoogleOther is used for AI model training. Google provides a separate robots.txt token, Google-Extended, specifically for controlling AI training data collection. If your concern is training data, block Google-Extended rather than (or in addition to) GoogleOther.

How GoogleOther Accesses Content

Here's how GoogleOther accesses your site and understands your content:

• Fetches publicly accessible HTML content via standard HTTP requests
• Uses a mobile or desktop Chrome-based user-agent string containing 'GoogleOther'
• Respects robots.txt Disallow and Allow directives
• Crawls from Google IP ranges published in common-crawlers.json
• Can be verified via reverse DNS matching Google hostname patterns (e.g., crawl-*.googlebot.com)

Generally continuous across Google's infrastructure, but GoogleOther may also be used for one-off or product-specific fetches. Expect a mix of steady background crawling and occasional bursts.

How to Block or Control GoogleOther

To block GoogleOther via robots.txt: User-agent: GoogleOther Disallow: / Variant tokens GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video can be blocked separately if you only want to restrict media fetches. For IP-based blocking, verify requests against Google's published IP ranges at the common-crawlers.json file referenced on https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers. Always confirm IPs via reverse DNS before blocking to avoid accidentally blocking legitimate Google infrastructure. Blocking GoogleOther does not affect Google Search indexing.

Common Issues & Troubleshooting

Watch out for these common problems when working with GoogleOther:

• User-agent strings can be spoofed; verify requests using reverse DNS and published IP ranges before making access decisions
• Google's distributed and changing IP ranges make pure IP-based blocking fragile and error-prone
• Blocking by IP without verification risks accidentally blocking legitimate Google infrastructure
• No documented support for Crawl-delay, so you cannot throttle GoogleOther through robots.txt alone
• Confusion between GoogleOther and Googlebot; blocking GoogleOther does not affect Google Search, and vice versa