le announces new Googlebot called GoogleOther

Google launched GoogleOther, a new Googlebot web crawler. GoogleOther is used by Google’s internal project teams for crawling the public web. Gary Illyes, Google, said on LinkedIn. It follows the same guidelines and protocols as the main Googlebot and frees up resources for main Googlebot.

GoogleOther. Google has added GoogleOther as a Google crawlers list document. It says: “Generic crawler which may be used by different product teams to fetch publicly accessible content on sites.” It can be used, for example, for internal research or development. “The GoogleOther crawler obeys the robots.txt rule for its user-agent token and global user-agent (*),, and uses the same ranges of IP addresses as Googlebot.”

User Agent. User Agent token and full string.

Why the new bot? Gary Illyes said that this new bot would “ultimately take some strain off Googlebot”. As we optimize the way and what Googlebot does crawl, we want to make sure that Googlebot’s crawling jobs are used only internally to build the index used by Search. We added a new GoogleOther crawler to replace other Googlebot jobs, such as R&D crawls, in order to free up crawl capacity.

Why we care You may check the crawling and bot activities on your site and log files. Do not panic if you see the new GoogleOther robot. It is actually a Googlebot. If you block this new Googlebot, it is not clear what will happen. Google stated that they use the bot for internal purposes. Does this mean it’s being used to Bard? It’s unclear.

You should probably keep an eye on this Googlebot and, if the stress it causes on your server is too high, decide whether you want it to have access to your website.

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