Search engine crawler
GoogleOther
Crawlers that index the web for search engines. Blocking them costs rankings.
Last updated
At a glance
| Category | Search engine crawler |
|---|---|
| Operator | |
| User agent match | contains "googleother" |
| Executes JavaScript | No |
| Respects robots.txt | Generally yes |
| Identity verifiable | Yes, against published IP ranges |
| IVT class | GIVT (general invalid traffic: declared automation) |
What GoogleOther is
GoogleOther crawls pages to build a search index. It is declared automation of the most ordinary kind: every site on the web is visited by it, and its traffic should be filtered out of your human numbers, never billed to a campaign and never blocked.
Google documents this bot, and the primary source beats any directory, ours included: official GoogleOther documentation.
Can the name be trusted?
The operator publishes the IP ranges GoogleOther calls from, and TrueVisit checks every visit claiming this name against them. A claim arriving from an address outside the published ranges fails verification and is reported as exactly that, so an impostor borrowing the name cannot borrow the trust.
Famous crawler names attract impostors, and a confirmed impostor is one of the few verdicts that carries intent. The routine for catching one is in how to spot fake Googlebot traffic.
Should you block it?
Do not block GoogleOther. Blocking a search engine crawler removes your pages from its index, and no bandwidth saving is worth that. The real risk with a famous crawler name is the opposite one: scrapers impersonate it to walk past filters, which is why verification matters more than blocking here.
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /How TrueVisit reports it
Visits from GoogleOther appear in your bot report under this exact name, never as an anonymous percentage, and every verdict stores the reason it was reached. Because this client never executes JavaScript, a browser-only tracker cannot see it at all; it is visible through server-side collection, which is how the visits reach your report.