GoogleOther

GoogleOther is an official web crawler from Google that acts as a catch-all user agent for various internal Google services that need to access web content. It is explicitly used by Google teams for crawling public web content for purposes other than indexing for Google Search. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string GoogleOther. This allows website owners to distinguish its activity from the main Googlebot and manage its access separately. Its behavior is typically more targeted and less frequent than Googlebot's broad crawls.

GoogleOther is visiting your website to collect data for a specific Google service that is not part of standard search indexing. This could be for internal research and development, or to support features in products like Google Translate, Google Lens, or certain Google Chrome services. Its crawl may be triggered by a user action (such as a translation request) or by a scheduled check from a specific Google service. Its visits are generally less frequent than those from Googlebot.

The primary purpose of GoogleOther is to support the various Google services that require web content analysis but are separate from the main search index. The data it collects helps Google provide enhanced services to users of these specialized tools. For website owners, the crawling provides indirect benefits by ensuring that their content functions correctly with these Google products. For example, it might help ensure your content displays properly when translated via Google Translate.

If you wish to prevent Google's internal teams from crawling your site for non-search purposes, you can block the GoogleOther bot. According to Google, this will have no impact on your site's ranking in Google Search. You can add the following rule to your robots.txt file:

To block this bot, use this directive:

User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /