Google-Safety bot

The Google-Safety bot is an official web crawler from Google that is part of its security infrastructure. Its function is to scan websites to identify security threats, including malware, phishing schemes, and harmful downloads. Unlike Google's indexing crawlers, its focus is purely on safety. A unique and defining characteristic of the Google-Safety bot is that it is designed to ignore robots.txt directives. This allows it to scan parts of a site that might be deliberately hidden from other crawlers, ensuring a more thorough security assessment.

The Google-Safety bot is crawling your website to perform a security check. This can be triggered for several reasons: as part of a routine security scan, if a link to your site has been shared through a Google service like Gmail, or if your site has been flagged for potential security issues. It is looking for malicious code, phishing content, or potentially unwanted programs. The frequency of its visits is variable and depends on factors like your site's popularity and its security history.

The primary purpose of the Google-Safety bot is to support Google's Safe Browsing initiative, which protects users from dangerous websites. The data it collects powers the security warnings seen in Chrome and other browsers that use the Safe Browsing API. It helps protect users from malicious content, identifies compromised websites so their owners can be notified, and maintains Google's database of harmful web resources. For website owners, the bot provides an indirect benefit by helping to identify security issues that might otherwise go undetected.

Blocking the Google-Safety bot is not possible through the robots.txt file, as it is designed to ignore these directives to effectively uncover hidden security threats. Attempting to block it via IP address is also impractical and not recommended, as Google uses a wide and dynamic range of IPs for its crawlers. The bot's activity is a key part of how Google protects users and website owners from security risks.