Googlebot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Google.
Googlebot is the search engine crawler for Google Search.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Sample user agent strings sent by Googlebot:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/153.0.8010.36 Safari/537.36Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/153.0.8010.36 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/153.0.8010.52 Safari/537.36Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of Googlebot requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 99% |
| Google LLC AS15169 | 99% |
| Google LLC AS396982 | 1% |
Genuine Googlebot IPs resolve to hostnames ending in googlebot.com. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP, then a forward lookup on the hostname, and check both match:
host 203.0.113.10 # the IP from your logs host crawl-name.googlebot.com # must return the same IP
Googlebot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Googlebot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot group, Googlebot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Googlebot from Googlebot's user agent; check Google's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Googlebot brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake Googlebot requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep Googlebot allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersGooglebot indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Googlebot on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Googlebot by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Googlebot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Google. Googlebot is the search engine crawler for Google Search.
Yes. Googlebot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the Googlebot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: Googlebot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Googlebot/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Googlebot may not follow it, and anyone can send Googlebot's user agent, so a fake Googlebot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. Genuine Googlebot IPs resolve to a hostname ending in googlebot.com, and a forward lookup of that hostname returns the same IP. Anything else using its user agent is an impersonator.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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