Googlebot-Video

Googlebot-Video is an official Google web crawler that focuses specifically on discovering, analyzing, and indexing video content from across the internet. It is a specialized member of the Googlebot family, designed to help Google Search find and understand videos for inclusion in search results. The bot identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string Googlebot-Video/1.0. It operates with a focus on video files and their associated contextual data, using specialized HTTP headers like Accept: video/* to indicate its purpose.

Googlebot-Video is visiting your website because it contains video content—either hosted directly or embedded from other platforms. The bot is there to discover and index these videos. It looks for videos by parsing XML sitemaps, identifying HTML5 <video> elements, and extracting structured data that uses VideoObject markup. The frequency of its visits depends on how often you update your video content and your site's overall authority. This is an authorized and beneficial crawling activity for any site with video content.

The main purpose of Googlebot-Video is to power Google's comprehensive video search results and features. The data it collects feeds into multiple Google systems, including video carousels and rich snippets in standard search, as well as video previews in Google Images. For website owners, having your videos properly indexed by this bot can drive significant traffic and increase visibility. The crawler helps Google understand important video attributes like duration, thumbnails, and content topics, which improves the relevance of search results for users.

If you want to prevent your videos from being indexed by Google, you can block Googlebot-Video using your robots.txt file. Note that this will prevent your videos from appearing in Google's video search results.

To block Googlebot-Video, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Video
Disallow: /