GoogleOther-Video

What does GoogleOther-Video do?

GoogleOther-Video is the video-fetching variant of Google's GoogleOther crawler family, designed to fetch publicly accessible video URLs for internal research and product-team use. It is not tied to a single public-facing Google product. Because it serves internal and R&D purposes, it does not drive referral traffic or citations back to your site.

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

GoogleOther-Video is an internal, R&D-oriented fetcher not tied to any specific user-facing Google product. It does not generate referral traffic or citations. Allowing it keeps your video content accessible to Google's internal teams, which could indirectly benefit future Google product integrations, but the direct growth value is minimal. If you have no concerns about Google accessing your video files, there is little reason to block it.

Data Usage & Training

There is no explicit statement from Google that GoogleOther-Video is used for AI model training. Google provides a separate token, Google-Extended, specifically for publishers who want to control whether their content is used for training. If training opt-out is your concern, configure Google-Extended rather than (or in addition to) GoogleOther-Video.

How GoogleOther-Video Accesses Content

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

• Fetches binary video data from publicly accessible URLs
• Sends requests with the user-agent string GoogleOther-Video/1.0
• Respects robots.txt Allow, Disallow, and Sitemap directives
• Source IPs fall within Google's published common-crawlers.json ranges
• Can be verified via reverse DNS matching *.googlebot.com hostnames

Occasional and on-demand. GoogleOther-Video performs R&D-oriented fetches rather than continuous crawling tied to a specific product schedule.

How to Block or Control GoogleOther-Video

To block GoogleOther-Video via robots.txt: User-agent: GoogleOther-Video Disallow: / For IP-based blocking, use the IP ranges published in Google's common-crawlers.json (referenced at https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers). Verify requests using reverse DNS before blocking. Hostnames should match patterns like crawl-*-*-*-*.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-*-*-*-*.geo.googlebot.com. Do not rely on the User-Agent header alone, as it can be spoofed. Be careful not to block too broadly, as shared IP ranges may affect other Google crawlers.

Common Issues & Troubleshooting

Watch out for these common problems when working with GoogleOther-Video:

• User-Agent strings can be spoofed; always verify via reverse DNS and Google's published IP ranges before making access decisions
• Blocking broad Google IP ranges can unintentionally affect other Google services and crawlers
• Google may update IP ranges and tokens over time; check the official documentation periodically
• Crawl-delay support is not documented for this crawler, so rate limiting via robots.txt may not work as expected
• Confusing GoogleOther-Video with Google-Extended when trying to opt out of AI training; these are separate tokens with different purposes