In short. GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler for publicly accessible content, with robots.txt controls that affect no specific product.

Definition: As of October 2026, GoogleOther is Google's generic crawler, a program that automatically scans websites, used to fetch publicly accessible content for various product teams, including internal research and development. Google documents its crawl preferences as affecting no specific product.

Key facts

Google's common crawlers documentation gives one-off internal research and development crawls as an example of GoogleOther's purpose.
A robots.txt file contains rules specifying which crawlers may access which paths; Google's robots.txt specification limits those rules to the file's host, protocol and port.
Google's request verification guide describes checking a request's source IP address through reverse and forward DNS lookups or published IP ranges.

What does GoogleOther serve?

Google's common crawler list places GoogleOther among crawlers that obey robots.txt rules when crawling automatically. Its purpose covers publicly accessible content fetched for different product teams.

The same documentation separates these crawl preferences from product-specific controls: GoogleOther preferences affect no specific product, while Googlebot preferences affect Google Search and other named Google services. A GoogleOther visit alone therefore provides no basis for identifying the Google product that uses the fetched content.

GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video are versions optimized for fetching publicly accessible image and video URLs respectively. Their documented crawl preferences also affect no specific product. Both list GoogleOther as an accepted robots.txt user-agent token, alongside their individual tokens.

How can a website control GoogleOther?

A user-agent token identifies the crawler targeted by a robots.txt group. Under Google's robots.txt interpretation, the following group disallows crawling of all paths for GoogleOther:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

The file belongs at the site's top level, such as https://example.com/robots.txt. Its rules apply to that host, protocol and port; a subdomain needs its own applicable file.

Google selects the group with the most specific matching user agent. A specific group and the global User-agent: * group are not combined. Existing GoogleOther-Image or GoogleOther-Video groups therefore need review when applying a family-level rule, because a more specific matching group takes precedence.

How can a GoogleOther request be checked?

The HTTP user-agent header identifies the client making a request. Google's common crawler documentation lists GoogleOther within mobile and desktop user-agent strings, and warns that this header can be spoofed.

Google's verification procedure starts with the source IP address recorded in server logs. A reverse DNS lookup retrieves a hostname; a forward lookup of that hostname must return the original address. For common crawlers, the documented hostname patterns end in googlebot.com or geo.googlebot.com. Automated checks can compare source addresses against Google's published common-crawlers.json IP ranges.

FAQ

Does a GoogleOther rule control Google Search crawling?

Google's crawler list assigns Google Search crawl preferences to Googlebot. It assigns no specific product to GoogleOther preferences.

Is GoogleOther the same as Google-Extended?

Google-Extended is a separate control token. The same documentation describes it as managing use of crawled content for future Gemini model training and grounding, which supplies search-index content to a model at prompt time. Google-Extended has no separate HTTP request user-agent string.

Sources

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