Operated by Google
Gemini CLI is an on-demand AI fetcher operated by Google. It retrieves a page only when a user explicitly asks an AI assistant or agent to read, summarize, or act on a specific URL. Because it is triggered by real user intent rather than bulk crawling, blocking it mainly prevents users from pulling your content into Google's assistant.
Gemini CLI is an on-demand AI fetcher operated by Google. It retrieves a page only when a user explicitly asks an AI assistant or agent to read, summarize, or act on a specific URL. Because it is triggered by real user intent rather than bulk crawling, blocking it mainly prevents users from pulling your content into Google's assistant.
Gemini CLI uses the user-agent token Google-Gemini-CLI. You can control it via robots.txt, meta tags (noai), or the emerging llms.txt standard. Robots.txt is voluntary; for hard enforcement, combine it with server-level IP blocking.
User-agent / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty.<code>User-agent: Google-Gemini-CLI</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.
Understanding Gemini CLI's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
Google-Gemini-CLI. Use this exact string in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. Matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive. Verify a request genuinely comes from Gemini CLI by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP.User-agent / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty./robots.txt file:
User-agent: Google-Gemini-CLI Disallow: /This instructs Gemini CLI not to crawl any path on your site. To block only specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g.,
Disallow: /blog/)./robots.txt before crawling, following RFC 9309. For hard enforcement, combine robots.txt with server-level IP or user-agent blocking.Google-Gemini-CLI (case-insensitive: grep -i "Google-Gemini-CLI" /var/log/nginx/access.log). Filter by user-agent in your log analytics tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).