GoogleOther

Google documents GoogleOther as a “generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content.” Google also documents GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video as variants optimised for image and video URLs respectively, both matched by the same GoogleOther token.

Why this is categorised as “unknown”

Google’s own documentation deliberately does not say which product team or purpose any given GoogleOther request serves — CrawlPact’s registry marks this “unknown” rather than guessing, consistent with FR-REG-005’s rule against presenting an unverified classification as certain.

Site-owner controls

Because Google’s own documentation doesn’t specify which product team or purpose a GoogleOther request serves, what disallowing it affects is correspondingly unspecific — it may affect an internal Google research or development use, but it does not affect Google Search indexing (Googlebot) or the generative-AI-training opt-out (Google-Extended), which are governed by their own separate, purpose-specific tokens. See /limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee.

Example robots.txt configuration

To disallow GoogleOther specifically, without affecting any other crawler:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

If no dedicated User-agent: GoogleOther group exists in a domain'srobots.txt, this crawler falls back to whatever the wildcard User-agent: * group says (RFC 9309) — see robots.txt syntax basics for how group selection works. A robots.txt rule is a published instruction; it does not technically prevent access.

Official source

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers

Verified against the source above as of 24 July 2026 — see how CrawlPact verifies crawler information.