GoogleImageProxy is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Google.
The Google Image Proxy bot is used to render link content sent via email in Gmail.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
GoogleImageProxy identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)Anyone 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.
We have not confirmed whether GoogleImageProxy follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: GoogleImageProxy Disallow: /
User-agent: GoogleImageProxy Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: GoogleImageProxy Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: GoogleImageProxy Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: GoogleImageProxy group, GoogleImageProxy ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.GoogleImageProxy from GoogleImageProxy'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.
GoogleImageProxy fetches pages when your links are shared or syndicated. Keep it allowed so previews and feeds work, but leave it out of page views and ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersWhen ads or posts are shared, GoogleImageProxy fetches the landing page. Those hits are not clicks, so keep them out of campaign reports.
Transfon Security for advertisersProduct links shared in chats and feeds are fetched by GoogleImageProxy. Keep it allowed so previews show the right image and price.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow GoogleImageProxy on public pages so shared links preview well, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows GoogleImageProxy 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
GoogleImageProxy is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Google. The Google Image Proxy bot is used to render link content sent via email in Gmail.
We have not confirmed whether GoogleImageProxy follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: GoogleImageProxy" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "GoogleImageProxy" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so GoogleImageProxy may not follow it, and anyone can send GoogleImageProxy's user agent, so a fake GoogleImageProxy ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
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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