Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate II0x95CDCA34UNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family Search Engines›Species GoogleOther
Specimen file · Search Engine Savanna

GoogleOther

Googlebotus alius

What is GoogleOther?

A general-purpose Google crawler used by product teams for research and one-off fetches. It does not feed Google Search. It is operated by Google and identifies itself as GoogleOther.

Temperament: vague. Asked what it does, it says "other things". Takes a few pages and declines to elaborate.

Operator
Google
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block GoogleOther ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GoogleOther)

To check a visitor really is GoogleOther, run a reverse DNS lookup on its IP address and confirm the hostname ends in .googlebot.com, .google.com, .googleusercontent.com. Then run a forward lookup on that hostname and check it returns the same IP. Anything that fails is an impostor; the zoo checks every visit this way and files the failures in the Trap Room.

§ II.

How to block GoogleOther

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from GoogleOther's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block GoogleOther from the whole site
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: GoogleOther
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Requests that use GoogleOther's name but fail Google's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does GoogleOther respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking GoogleOther hurt my search rankings?

Yes, for Google's search engine. Blocked pages can drop out of its results. Other search engines are unaffected.

How often does GoogleOther visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

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