Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate XLVIII0x43EA3B5DUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family Search Engines›Species Storebot-Google
Specimen file · Search Engine Savanna

Storebot-Google

Googlebotus mercatorius

What is Storebot-Google?

Google's shopping crawler. It reads product and checkout pages for Google Shopping and Merchant Center. It is operated by Google and identifies itself as Storebot-Google.

Temperament: acquisitive. Looks for a price tag on every page. The zoo has none. It keeps looking.

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
§ I.

Identification

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

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; Storebot-Google/1.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.88 Safari/537.36

To check a visitor really is Storebot-Google, 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 Storebot-Google

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 Storebot-Google's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

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

If you sell things, blocking it can keep your products out of Google Shopping.

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: Storebot-Google
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 Storebot-Google'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 Storebot-Google 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 Storebot-Google 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 Storebot-Google 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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