How Googlebot works#
Googlebot starts from known URLs and sitemaps, fetches pages, follows links to find new ones, and passes content to Google’s rendering service (an evergreen version of Chromium) to execute JavaScript. Most crawling today uses Googlebot Smartphone; a desktop crawler is used for a smaller share of requests.
Other Google crawlers#
| Crawler | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Googlebot Image / Video | Images and videos for Google Images and video results |
| Google-InspectionTool | URL Inspection and Rich Results Test in Search Console |
| Google-Extended | A robots.txt token to control use of content for Gemini model training; it doesn’t affect Search |
| AdsBot | Checks ad landing page quality |
Verifying real Googlebot#
Scrapers often pretend to be Googlebot. To verify, do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP — it should resolve to googlebot.com or google.com — then a forward lookup back to the same IP, or check against Google’s published IP ranges.
Helping Googlebot#
- Don’t block CSS or JavaScript in robots.txt.
- Keep server responses fast and stable; frequent 5xx errors reduce crawling.
- Provide a clean XML sitemap and strong internal links.
- Monitor Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats.
Related: crawl budget, mobile-first indexing, user agent.