List of Google’s Common Crawlers

Google uses automated bots, known as crawlers, to discover and index content across the web. These crawlers don’t just fetch your site once different types of crawlers are assigned to handle different content, like web pages, images, and videos. Knowing which ones are visiting your site helps you manage visibility, troubleshoot crawling issues, and keep your SEO healthy.

Why You Should Know Google’s Crawlers

When Google visits your site, it doesn’t always use the same crawler. Instead, it sends different crawlers (also called Googlebots) depending on what type of content it wants to fetch web pages, images, ads, videos, or even mobile-specific versions.

Understanding these crawlers helps you:

• Read your server logs more accurately

• Avoid blocking important bots in your robots.txt file

• Manage your crawl budget efficiently

• Troubleshoot crawling or indexing issues

Google’s Common Crawlers

Here are the most common Google crawlers you may see in your logs:

Why Multiple Crawlers Matter for SEO

• Blocking the wrong crawler in robots.txt could stop your pages, images, or videos from appearing in search.

• If you’re running ads, blocking AdsBot may lower ad quality scores.

• Since mobile-first indexing is now the default, ensuring your site is accessible to Googlebot Smartphone is critical.

Learn more about controlling what bots can crawl in our robots.txt guide.

How to Check If a Request Is From Google

Google recommends verifying crawlers by IP rather than only relying on user-agent strings (since these can be faked by bots).

Steps:

1. Reverse DNS lookup of the IP address.

2. Verify that the domain ends with googlebot.com or google.com.

3. Forward-confirm that the IP resolves back to Google.