In short. Googlebot-News targets Google News through robots.txt and page-level controls, while requests use existing Googlebot user-agent strings.

Definition: As of October 2026, Googlebot-News is Google's robots.txt user-agent token for controlling participation in Google News, including news.google.com and the Google News app. Requests use existing Googlebot HTTP user-agent strings, without a separate Googlebot-News request string.

Key facts

Google's common crawlers documentation lists both Googlebot-News and Googlebot as robots.txt tokens for Googlebot News.
Google's Publisher Center guidance distinguishes blocking Googlebot-News for Google News from blocking Googlebot for both Google News and Google Search.
Google's robots meta tag specification supports googlebot-news for news results and shows a news-specific nosnippet example.
Google's robots.txt specification gives a matching example in which Googlebot News follows the googlebot-news group and Googlebot for web search follows the googlebot group.

How does a robots.txt rule control Google News?

A robots.txt file supplies crawling rules through groups of User-agent, Allow, and Disallow lines. Google's Publisher Center guidance instructs publishers to block Googlebot-News in this file to prevent their site from appearing in Google News. A site-wide group matching that instruction is:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

The same guidance requires crawler access to robots.txt itself so Google can read the exclusions. Its separate instruction for excluding a site from both Google Search and Google News targets Googlebot. The choice of token therefore determines the documented product scope of the restriction.

How can an individual article or snippet be restricted?

A robots meta tag is an HTML element that supplies page-level indexing or display instructions. Google's Publisher Center guidance gives this example for excluding individual articles from Google News:

<meta name="Googlebot-News" content="noindex, nofollow">

Here, noindex excludes the page from the targeted search results, while nofollow instructs Google not to follow its links. Google's meta tag specification also shows how to suppress a Google News snippet while allowing a full snippet in web search:

<meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">

The specification says these settings can be read and followed only when crawlers can access the page. A page intended to communicate a meta tag must therefore remain accessible for Google to read that instruction.

Which rules need checking before a change?

Google's robots.txt specification selects the most specific matching user-agent group. Rules in a specific group and the global User-agent: * group are not combined. Multiple groups for the same specific user agent are combined internally.

A review therefore checks the relevant Googlebot-News group together with any other groups naming that token. A general wildcard exclusion alone does not describe the effective rules when a more specific group exists. Moving a group higher in the file does not change precedence: Google says group order is irrelevant.

FAQ

Should you look for a separate Googlebot-News request string in server logs?

Google's common crawlers documentation says crawling uses various Googlebot user-agent strings. It lists no separate Googlebot-News HTTP request user agent.

Can you use lowercase googlebot-news in a meta tag?

Yes. Google's meta tag specification says the name and content attributes are case-insensitive and uses lowercase googlebot-news in its snippet example.

Sources

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