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SEARCH ENGINES · GOOGLE

Googlebot-News

A robots.txt control token only: Google crawls news with the usual Googlebot, so no request is ever Googlebot-News. It controls Google News.

Copy the robots.txt rule
All search engines
  • Follows robots.txt
  • A robots.txt control token
  • Docs checked 28 Oct 2026
At a glanceGoogle
  • Control tokenIdentityNothing to check: robots.txt only
  • Obeysrobots.txtFollows robots.txt
  • PurposeSearch indexingNot an AI product
  • TokenGooglebot-NewsA control token, not a crawler

robots.txt

The operator documents that this bot follows robots.txt rules.

Block Googlebot-News
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /
Allow Googlebot-News
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Allow: /

Quick facts

robots.txt token
Googlebot-News
Requests
None: a robots.txt control token, not a crawler
Operator
Google
Purpose
Search indexing
robots.txt
Follows robots.txt
Verification
Not applicable
Documentation
developers.google.com · checked 28 Oct 2026

If you block it

Tells Google not to use your pages for this purpose. It is a control token, so crawling by its other bots carries on.

Check a visit is real

  • Nothing to check: no request ever carries this name. It only appears in robots.txt.

Where this comes from

The same registry NdovuSEOLabs uses to classify crawler traffic in your server and CDN logs, built from the operator’s own documentation.

Registry version 2026-10-29.1

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