GoogleOther
Google operates GoogleOther, a generic crawler that its product teams may use to fetch publicly accessible content, including one-off research and development crawls. Rules for the robots.txt token GoogleOther affect no specific Google product, and Google says the crawler honors them. Site owners verify it by reverse DNS to googlebot.com with forward confirmation, or against the published common-crawlers.json ranges.
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; GoogleOther)What GoogleOther does
GoogleOther appears in logs with a Chrome-style user agent that carries the token (compatible; GoogleOther). The mobile form starts with Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P), while the desktop form is Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36. Google describes it as the generic crawler that various product teams may use to fetch publicly accessible content, giving one-off crawls for internal research and development as an example. Google files it among its common crawlers, the group covered by the common-crawlers.json range file.
The robots.txt token is GoogleOther, and Google says the crawler obeys it. Google states that crawling preferences addressed to this token do not affect any specific product, so the operator describes no effect on Google Search or any named Google service from blocking GoogleOther; what a block stops is the fetching done for internal research and development and other team-level uses. The token does not match the Googlebot token, so a rule for Googlebot leaves GoogleOther untouched. The sub-variants GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video obey the GoogleOther token as well.
Verification uses Google's common-crawler method. A reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP should return a hostname ending in googlebot.com, in the form crawl-***-***-***-***.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-***-***-***-***.geo.googlebot.com; Google also lists google.com and googleusercontent.com as valid suffixes for its crawlers. A forward lookup on that hostname must return the original IP. As an alternative, match the address against the ranges in https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json. Google documents both methods.
Operator note. Common crawler. Desktop UA: 'Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36'. It does not match the Googlebot token; only 'GoogleOther' is listed. The sub-variants GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video also obey the GoogleOther token.
Controlling GoogleOther with robots.txt
Use the token GoogleOther in robots.txt. Google documents that GoogleOther honors robots.txt directives.
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /Verifying a request is really GoogleOther
Anyone can put GoogleOther in a User-Agent header. Reverse DNS to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com with matching forward DNS, or match the source IP against the published common-crawlers.json ranges.
host <request-ip>
# expect a hostname ending in googlebot.com (crawl-***-***-***-***.googlebot.com or geo-crawl-***-***-***-***.geo.googlebot.com)
host <that-hostname>
# expect it to resolve back to <request-ip>Google publishes a machine-readable list. Our probe read it on 2026-09-06; the file's own creation time was 2026-09-04.
- Prefixes
- 317
- IPv4
- 170
- IPv6
- 147
First entries at fetch time: 2001:4860:4801:10::/64, 2001:4860:4801:11::/64, 2001:4860:4801:12::/64
SHA-256 of the fetched body: 241e712f9c902b33aa4c0cc79268c34cb00c025edbc27298547be298763ddade
Common questions
Should I block GoogleOther?
Google says rules for the GoogleOther token affect no specific product, so the operator describes no removal from Google Search or any named service when you block it. A block stops the generic fetching that product teams use for things like one-off internal research and development crawls. Sites that only want product-linked crawling can block it without a documented search cost.
Does blocking Googlebot also block GoogleOther?
No. Google lists only GoogleOther as the token this crawler obeys, and it does not match the Googlebot token. A robots.txt group for Googlebot leaves GoogleOther free to crawl. To cover it, add a group for User-agent: GoogleOther; that group also governs the GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video variants.
How do I verify GoogleOther?
Reverse-resolve the source IP and check for a hostname ending in googlebot.com (crawl-...googlebot.com or geo-crawl-...geo.googlebot.com), google.com or googleusercontent.com, then resolve that hostname forward and confirm it returns the same IP. Or match the IP against Google's common-crawlers.json file at developers.google.com.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against Google's own documentation, listed below, and re-checked by a second reviewer before publication. Reviewed September 2026.
Related crawlers
This registry documents how operators describe their own bots so site owners can identify and control them. It does not publish third-party IP lists or guess at undocumented behaviour. To see how your own site responds to automated visitors, the bot detection scanner reads a URL's live response and names the protection it finds.