How to recognize it

User agents, as they reach our logs:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; GoogleOther)
GoogleOther
  • First and second strings: the desktop and mobile crawlers.
  • Third, bare GoogleOther: made every robots.txt request we saw, plus a few homepage requests.

Match on the token GoogleOther, after the more specific GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video.

  • robots.txt token: GoogleOther
  • IP list (JSON): common-crawlers.json
  • Reverse DNS: crawl-*.googlebot.com, the same as Googlebot.

What it does

Google calls GoogleOther the generic crawler that various product teams may use to fetch publicly accessible content. Google says rules for it do not affect any specific product. It is one of the common crawlers, which always obey robots.txt for automatic crawls.

What you gain by allowing it

  • Nothing you can point to. Google names no product that depends on it.

What you lose

By allowing it

  • Crawl load, small on our sites: 124 requests in 8 days.
  • An unknown use. Google does not say what the product teams do with the content, and Cloudflare files the crawler under “AI Crawler”.

By blocking it

  • Nothing documented. Google says blocking GoogleOther does not affect any product, Search included.

How to verify it

Forward-confirmed reverse DNS to googlebot.com, as for Googlebot, or a match against common-crawlers.json. Cloudflare flags it as a verified bot, but in the category “AI Crawler”, not “Search Engine Crawler”.

Gotchas and history

  • It shares Googlebot’s addresses and reverse DNS names. Only the user agent separates the two, so an IP-based “allow Google” rule lets both in.
  • Cloudflare’s category says AI while Google’s description says nothing about AI. If you block “AI crawlers” with Cloudflare’s managed rules, check whether GoogleOther is caught.
  • Its relatives GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video have separate tokens, so blocking GoogleOther does not cover them.

What we observed

Data: Cloudflare Logpush for two of our sites, 19-26 October 2026 (8 days).

  • 124 requests, every one verified by forward-confirmed reverse DNS and by Cloudflare’s flag (category “AI Crawler”). No fakes.
  • 40 different paths across 3 hostnames, on all 8 days.
  • 8 requests were for /robots.txt, all with the bare GoogleOther user agent.

About Google

  • Common crawlers (Googlebot and its Image and Video variants, GoogleOther, Storebot-Google and others) crawl automatically for Google products and always obey robots.txt. Reverse DNS: crawl-*.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-*.geo.googlebot.com.
  • Special-case crawlers (AdsBot, Mediapartners and others) work for products where the site has an agreement with Google. AdsBot, for example, ignores the * group in robots.txt with the advertiser’s permission. Reverse DNS: rate-limited-proxy-*.google.com.
  • User-triggered fetchers fetch a page because a user asked a Google tool or product to. Reverse DNS: *.gae.googleusercontent.com or google-proxy-*.google.com.
  • Google-Extended is a robots.txt token, not a crawler. It decides whether content fetched by the crawlers above may train Gemini models and ground Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. It does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

Each group has its own reverse DNS pattern and IP list. A verifier that accepts every Google domain for every Google user agent lets Google Cloud VMs through (see the Googlebot card).

Sources