# Googlebot vs GoogleOther

Googlebot and GoogleOther compared on 13 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Googlebot | GoogleOther | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | yes | not documented | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | no | no | same |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | no | different |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | yes | different |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | 0.991 | not documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | search | mixed | different |
| reads_llms_txt | no | not documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | GoogleOther | different |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | not_documented | different |
| user_agent_string_full | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) | not documented | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | yes | yes | same |

## Differences

| Field | Googlebot statement | GoogleOther statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode return AI generated responses with links to supporting websites. | not documented |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | GoogleOther made 93 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z and fetched /robots.txt on none of those requests. GoogleOther's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail was the home page at 2026-09-14T12:03:30Z. |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | GoogleOther requested the /mcp endpoint of Rattlesnakes By Mail twice between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, at 2026-09-14T15:07:30Z and at 2026-09-14T18:27:49Z. Rattlesnakes By Mail returned status 405 to both GoogleOther requests for /mcp. |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z. | not documented |
| purpose_documented | Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover. | GoogleOther is a generic crawler that Google product teams use to fetch publicly accessible content from sites. |
| reads_llms_txt | Google Search does not use llms.txt files. | not documented |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | The robots.txt token for GoogleOther is GoogleOther. |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended token. | Google does not document whether content fetched by GoogleOther is used for Gemini training. |
| user_agent_string_full | Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). | not documented |

## Sources

- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googlebot
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googleother