GoogleOther

What GoogleOther does

A training crawler collects pages to train its operator's AI models. Its visits answer no one's question in the moment: what it reads goes into the data the models learn from.

How to recognize it

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

A user agent is only a claim, though: anyone can send GoogleOther. 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 GoogleOther

Google publishes the IP ranges GoogleOther uses, as JSON: developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json. A request from inside those ranges is the real GoogleOther. 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 GoogleOther's numbers. How verdicts work.

Allow or block GoogleOther in robots.txt

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

To let it read everything, name it with an allow rule. A group that names GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther to read it and follow it. Ethogram reads your robots.txt every day and shows whether GoogleOther 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 GoogleOther.

See what GoogleOther does on your site

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

• Every visit from GoogleOther, with a verdict on whether it's really GoogleOther.
• 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 GoogleOther.
• 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.