GoogleImageProxy

Google image proxy fetching and caching images for Gmail display

About this crawler

GoogleImageProxy is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern GoogleImageProxy in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as social-preview. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block GoogleImageProxy traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

No block-rate data for this crawler.

Technical details

Name: GoogleImageProxy
Pattern: GoogleImageProxy
Tags: social-preview
Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
Added: 2026/04/17
rDNS suffixes: .1e100.net, .googlebot.com, .googleusercontent.com
Instances: 1 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely GoogleImageProxy with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

.1e100.net
.googlebot.com
.googleusercontent.com

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow GoogleImageProxy:

User-agent: GoogleImageProxy Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GoogleImageProxy [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "GoogleImageProxy") { return 403; }

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