prerender[ OBSERVATORY ]
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Googlebot

Google's web crawler. It fetches pages for Google Search, then renders them with current Chrome and indexes what the rendered page shows.

OperatorGoogle
What it's forSearch index
Renders JavaScriptYes
Verify byReverse DNS or IP list

Who runs it

Google. It names itself with the token Googlebot in its user agent, in a smartphone and a desktop version. Google indexes mobile-first, so most fetches come from the smartphone version.

Smartphone user agent, as Google documents it
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

What it does

It finds pages through links and sitemaps and fetches them for Google's index. Other Google machines carry their own names: Google-InspectionTool runs Search Console's live tests, and Google-Extended is a robots.txt token for Gemini training, not a separate crawler.

Renders JavaScript

Yes. Google renders pages with an evergreen Chromium after fetching them, sometimes days later, and indexes the rendered result. Content that appears only after a click or a long wait may not make it into the index.

How to verify it

Run a reverse DNS lookup on the visiting address. The name should end in googlebot.com, google.com or googleusercontent.com, and a forward lookup of that name should return the same address. Or match the address against Google's published list.

Reverse, then forward
$ host 66.249.66.1
1.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com.
$ host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com
crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com has address 66.249.66.1

common-crawlers.json, Google's IP list

robots.txt

Rules under User-agent: Googlebot apply to it. It honors Disallow and Allow and ignores Crawl-delay. Blocking it removes your pages from Google Search.

Questions

Is Google-InspectionTool Googlebot?

No. It's the machine behind Search Console's URL Inspection and Rich Results tests, with its own user agent token.

Does blocking Google-Extended hide me from Search?

No. Google-Extended controls whether your content is used for Gemini training; Googlebot still indexes the page for Search.

How long does Googlebot wait for my JavaScript?

Google doesn't publish a number. This site's rendering pages measure it from verified visits, and this page will show what they record.

Last checked against Google's documentation: 31 Oct 2026Verified visits recorded here: shown once the site is live