Googlebot

What Googlebot does

A search crawler reads your pages ahead of time and adds them to its operator's index. That index is what its search and assistant draw on to find pages and point people to them.

How to recognize it

Googlebot names itself in its user agent with the token Googlebot. That's what Ethogram matches, as a whole word in any case.

A user agent is only a claim, though: anyone can send Googlebot. Scrapers borrow well-known names to get past rules meant for the real agent, so before you trust a visit, or block one, check where it came from.

How to tell it's really Googlebot

Google publishes the IP ranges Googlebot uses, as JSON: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json. A request from inside those ranges is the real Googlebot. One from outside them is an impostor.

It can also be checked by reverse DNS: the request's IP resolves to a hostname ending in .googlebot.com or .google.com, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP. Check both directions: whoever controls an IP can point its reverse record at any name.

Ethogram runs these checks on every request and gives each visit a verdict: verified, unverified or spoofed. Spoofed visits are counted apart and never added to Googlebot's numbers. How verdicts work.

Allow or block Googlebot in robots.txt

robots.txt groups its rules by user-agent token. To ask Googlebot to stay off your whole site, add this group:

To let it read everything, name it with an allow rule. A group that names Googlebot replaces the User-agent: * group for it, so it follows only these rules:

robots.txt is a request, not a lock: it's up to Googlebot to read it and follow it. Ethogram reads your robots.txt every day and shows whether Googlebot respects it, with the disallowed paths it asked for. To actually keep it out, use your firewall or bot protection, and check the visit's verdict first so you block impostors, not the real Googlebot.

See what Googlebot does on your site

Most analytics filter Googlebot out as a bot. Ethogram records it on your server, where every request lands, with no script to load, and shows:

• Every visit from Googlebot, with a verdict on whether it's really Googlebot.
• Each visit step by step: the pages it read, what it searched for, and where it was blocked, looped or hit an error.
• Whether it respects your robots.txt, with the disallowed paths it asked for.
• How much of your bandwidth it takes, next to its share of requests.
• Impostors that use its name, caught and counted apart from the real Googlebot.
• New versions of its user agent as they appear, and what changed in its behavior with each.
• A heads-up when its visits spike or stop, or when it starts getting blocked.