GoogleScholar is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Google.
Google Scholar uses a bot to crawl and index scholarly literature from academic publishers, repositories, and university websites. This populates its academic search engine.
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.
GoogleScholar identifies itself with this user agent string:
Googlebot-IA/2.1Anyone 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 GoogleScholar 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: Googlebot-IA Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-IA Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Googlebot-IA Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-IA Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-IA group, GoogleScholar ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Googlebot-IA from GoogleScholar'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.
GoogleScholar brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake GoogleScholar 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 GoogleScholar allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersGoogleScholar indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow GoogleScholar 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 GoogleScholar 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
GoogleScholar is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Google. Google Scholar uses a bot to crawl and index scholarly literature from academic publishers, repositories, and university websites. This populates its academic search engine.
We have not confirmed whether GoogleScholar 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: Googlebot-IA" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Googlebot-IA/" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so GoogleScholar may not follow it, and anyone can send GoogleScholar's user agent, so a fake GoogleScholar ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
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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