GoogleReadAloud is a bot in the accessibility checkers category, operated by Google.
Google Read Aloud service enables reading web pages using text-to-speech (TTS).
Accessibility checkers scan pages for WCAG issues on behalf of site owners and auditors. Allow the checkers you run and keep them out of analytics.
Sample user agent strings sent by GoogleReadAloud:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)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.
Share of GoogleReadAloud requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 98% |
| Finland | 2% |
| Google LLC AS15169 | 100% |
Genuine GoogleReadAloud IPs resolve to hostnames ending in google.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.google.com # must return the same IP
We have not confirmed whether GoogleReadAloud 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: Google-Read-Aloud Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud group, GoogleReadAloud ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Google-Read-Aloud from GoogleReadAloud'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.
Allow GoogleReadAloud if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersGoogleReadAloud is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow GoogleReadAloud only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf GoogleReadAloud is a service you use, allow it on the endpoints it needs and block it elsewhere.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows GoogleReadAloud 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
GoogleReadAloud is a bot in the accessibility checkers category, operated by Google. Google Read Aloud service enables reading web pages using text-to-speech (TTS).
We have not confirmed whether GoogleReadAloud 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: Google-Read-Aloud" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Google-Read-Aloud" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so GoogleReadAloud may not follow it, and anyone can send GoogleReadAloud's user agent, so a fake GoogleReadAloud 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 GoogleReadAloud IPs resolve to a hostname ending in google.com, and a forward lookup of that hostname returns the same IP. Anything else using its user agent is an impersonator.
Accessibility checkers scan pages for WCAG issues on behalf of site owners and auditors. Allow the checkers you run and keep them out of analytics.
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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