Other bots
Google-Safety
Crawls for abuse checks, such as finding malware.
Ignores robots.txt- User agent token
- Google-Safety
- Operator
- Verification
- Published IP list
- Source
- Google documentation
What a bot for ads, link previews or SEO tools does
These bots work for a specific product: checking an ad's landing page, drawing the preview when a link is shared, or collecting data for an SEO tool. Some only visit because the site owner asked them to.
Google says it ignores all robots.txt rules.
Block or allow Google-Safety in robots.txt
Add one of these to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Crawlers read it before they fetch anything else.
Block Google-Safety
User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /Allow Google-Safety
User-agent: Google-Safety
Allow: /More from Google
Questions, answered.
Google-Safety is a bot for ads, link previews or SEO tools run by Google. Crawls for abuse checks, such as finding malware.
No. Google says robots.txt does not apply to Google-Safety. Google says it ignores all robots.txt rules.
Add "User-agent: Google-Safety" and "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Since robots.txt may not stop it, block it at your firewall or server too.
Check the request's IP address against the list Google publishes. A user agent alone proves nothing, since any script can copy it.
No. Google-Safety works for one product, such as ad checks, link previews or SEO data, rather than bringing visitors.
Only if you don't use the product it works for. Blocking Google-Safety is safe for your search rankings.
In its own documentation at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-special-case-crawlers. Every fact on this page comes from there.
Still have questions? We're happy to help.
See which bots really read your site.
NoirTrack counts Google-Safety and every other bot apart from real visitors, and its firewall can block them before they reach your pages.
Start free trialFree 14-day trial, no credit card. The server SDK also sees bots that never run JavaScript.