Googlebot
Google's main web crawling bot for search indexing
About this crawler
Googlebot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Googlebot\/ in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Googlebot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
3.9%
Technical details
- Name
- Googlebot
- Pattern
Googlebot\/- Tags
- search-engine
- Reference
- http://www.google.com/bot.html
- rDNS suffixes
.1e100.net,.googlebot.com,.googleusercontent.com- Instances
- 8 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely Googlebot 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
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Googlebot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot\/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Googlebot\\/") {
return 403;
}
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