GN

Googlebot-News

search-engine Googlebot-News

Google's news-specific web crawling bot for Google News indexing

About this crawler

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

Block-rate · top 25k sites

0.85%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: Googlebot-News
2026-05-012026-06-041.1%

Technical details

Name
Googlebot-News
Pattern
Googlebot-News
Tags
search-engine
rDNS suffixes
.1e100.net, .googlebot.com, .googleusercontent.com
Instances
1 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely Googlebot-News 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.

Sample User-Agent strings

Googlebot-News

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow Googlebot-News:

User-agent: Googlebot-News Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

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

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Googlebot-News") { return 403; }
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