Safe Official docs Google Bots

Google Safety

Q: What is the official user-agent string for Google Safety?

The official user-agent string for Google Safety is: Google-Safety . 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 Google Safety by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP.

Q: Is Google Safety safe?

Yes, Google Safety is a safe and legitimate crawler operated by Google. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309) and can be controlled with standard robots.txt rules.

Q: Will blocking Google Safety hurt my SEO?

🔶 AI Visibility Trade-off - Blocking Google Safety will not hurt Google or Bing rankings, but it can remove your content from AI search answers and assistant citations powered by this crawler. Block only if you have a deliberate reason.

Q: How do I block Google Safety in robots.txt?

Add the following lines to your /robots.txt file: User-agent: Google-Safety Disallow: / This instructs Google Safety not to crawl any path on your site. To block only specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g., Disallow: /blog/ ).

Q: How do I verify if Google Safety is crawling my site?

Search your web server access logs for the string Google-Safety (case-insensitive: grep -i "Google-Safety" /var/log/nginx/access.log ). Filter by user-agent in your log analytics tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).

Operated by Google

Scout's quick take

Google Safety checks pages for uptime, performance or changes. It is usually harmless; block it only if it is not a service you use.

# Block only if you really mean to
User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /

Run the free crawlability checker Build a full robots.txt

Quick Facts

User-Agent:: Google-Safety
Category:: Google Bots
Operator:: Google
Safety:: Safe
Blocking Impact:: Low - No SEO ranking impact
SEO Impact Score:: 2/10
Official docs:: developers.google.com

Confirmed by the operator

Google names Google-Safety on its own documentation page, linked above. The token, purpose and robots.txt behaviour on this profile come from that page, re-checked on October 19, 2026.

What is Google Safety?

Google Safety is a monitoring and validation agent operated by Google. It checks pages, ad destinations, or policy compliance rather than collecting training data. It has no effect on search rankings.
Google Safety uses the user-agent token Google-Safety. 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.

What happens if you block Google Safety?

🔶 AI Visibility Trade-off - Blocking Google Safety will not hurt Google or Bing rankings, but it can remove your content from AI search answers and assistant citations powered by this crawler. Block only if you have a deliberate reason.

Generally safe to allow; provides legitimate crawling value.

How to block Google Safety with robots.txt

<code>User-agent: Google-Safety</code> - Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.

Block completely (robots.txt)

User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /

Allow all (robots.txt)

User-agent: Google-Safety
Allow: /

Block private only (robots.txt)

User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /admin/
Allow: /

Nginx server block

# Nginx: Hard-block Google Safety
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Google-Safety") {
    return 403 "Bot blocked";
}

Apache .htaccess

# Apache: Hard-block Google Safety
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Google-Safety" bad_bot
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot

Meta robots tag

X-Robots-Tag header

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

Is Google Safety safe to allow?

Yes, Google Safety is a safe and legitimate crawler operated by Google. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309) and can be controlled with standard robots.txt rules.

Verify by reverse-DNS lookup: legitimate Google Safety requests resolve to Google's domain.

What does Google Safety do?

Understanding Google Safety's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.

Validates pages, ads, or policy compliance
Performs automated quality and safety checks
Does not collect training data
No impact on search rankings
Generally safe to allow

Google Safety in context

Google Safety is a utility crawler operated by Google. In plain terms, it checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service. Our database files it under Google crawlers and ranks it Tier 3, mid-priority crawlers with a clear purpose but a smaller audience. 20 of the 24 Google crawlers in our database share this tier.

Its safety rating is safe and its blocking impact is not documented. So the decision about Google Safety rests on what you want from Google, not on its behaviour. How we rate safety and impact.

How site owners treat Google Safety

Our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 did not track Google-Safety as a named token, so we do not publish an adoption figure for it. If you run a large site, your own logs are the best evidence of how often it visits.

Does it follow robots.txt?

Google Safety's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the Google Safety rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

Google crawlers and close alternatives

Google Safety is one of 32 Google crawlers in our database. A User-agent: Google-Safety group controls Google Safety only; the other Google tokens below need their own lines.

Google-Safety: this crawler (Tier 3)
AdsBot-Google: Google Ads Quality (Desktop), checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service (Tier 3)
AdsBot-Google-Mobile: Google Ads Quality (Mobile), checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service (Tier 3)
APIs-Google: APIs-Google, fetches a page when a person asks an assistant or app to open it (Tier 3)
Chrome-Lighthouse: Lighthouse Audit, checks pages for an SEO, uptime or analytics service (Tier 4)
FeedFetcher-Google: Google Feed Fetcher, builds a search or answer index (Tier 3)
Gemini-Deep-Research: Gemini-Deep-Research, fetches a page when a person asks an assistant or app to open it (Tier 3)
Google-Agent: Google Agent (Project Mariner), fetches a page when a person asks an assistant or app to open it (Tier 2)
Google-CloudVertexBot: Google Vertex AI, fetches a page when a person asks an assistant or app to open it (Tier 3)

To give Google Safety the same answer as its siblings, stack User-agent: Google-Safety with their lines above one set of rules; to treat Google Safety differently, give it its own group.

No other crawler in our Google crawlers category has exactly the same purpose, which makes Google Safety an unusual case: decide about it on its own merits.

We first recorded Google-Safety on September 22, 2026. Google documents it on developers.google.com, and we recheck that page before each release.

Which rule Google Safety actually follows

Google Safety reads exactly one group in robots.txt, the most specific one that names Google-Safety, and never combines rules across groups. This short file shows the trap:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /drafts/

Find the group. Google Safety looks for a group naming Google-Safety. One exists, so it ignores User-agent: * completely.
Apply only that group. It is refused /drafts/ and nothing else.
The surprise. /private/ is open to Google Safety, because that rule lives in the * group it no longer reads. To keep it out of both, repeat Disallow: /private/ inside its own group.

Test yourself: does a rule under User-agent: * apply to Google Safety if the file also has a User-agent: Google-Safety group?

No. Once a group names it, Google Safety reads only that group. Put every rule you want it to follow inside its own group.

Test yourself: will blocking Google Safety remove your pages from AI answers?

Often, yes. Google Safety is a utility crawler, so pages it cannot fetch can drop out of the answers or results it supports.

Test yourself: is User-agent: google-safety the same as User-agent: Google-Safety?

Yes. RFC 9309 makes user-agent matching case-insensitive. Paths are a different story: Disallow: /Blog/ does not block /blog/.

Should you allow Google Safety? Decide by situation

Recommended setting for Google Safety by type of site
If you are...	Recommended setting
You publish content and want AI answers to cite it	Low stakes either way. It does not decide whether AI answers cite you.
You license content and want to stop AI training	Blocking it does not stop training, because Google Safety is a utility crawler. Block the operator's training crawler instead.
You run an online shop	Allow it unless it is overloading your servers.
Your server is under load from bots	Rate-limit before blocking. It is rated safe in our database.

Check Google Safety on your own site

Open /robots.txt on your domain and search for Google-Safety. If it is not named, it follows User-agent: *.
List the Disallow lines in the group Google Safety follows and test your key URLs against them; the longest match wins, and Allow wins a tie.
Look beyond the file. A firewall or bot manager can refuse Google Safety even when robots.txt allows it, and that never shows in the file.
Run our AI bot crawlability test to see how Google Safety and every other crawler we track are treated in one pass, including firewall refusals.

Common mistakes with Google Safety

The errors we see most often with Google Safety in the files and firewalls we test:

Treating Google Safety as an AI or search crawler. Blocking it has little effect on visibility; decide based on load and what it does with your data.
Relying on robots.txt alone when Google Safety is rated caution or aggressive. Back the rule with a server-side block.
Blocking Google Safety by IP alone. Ranges change; match the token and verify with logs.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check Google Safety from outside after every change.

Spotting Google Safety in your logs

robots.txt says what Google Safety may do; your access logs show what it actually did.

Count requests

On a server with standard Nginx or Apache logs, this counts matching requests per day (adjust the log path for your host):

grep -iE "Google-Safety" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c

And this shows which paths it requested most, which is the quickest way to see whether your Disallow lines are being respected:

grep -iE "Google-Safety" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

Check the requests are genuine

Anyone can send the Google Safety user-agent, so confirm the source before acting on a match:

Google-Safety: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where the operator documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable Google Safety request with caution.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the official user-agent string for Google Safety?

The official user-agent string for Google Safety is: Google-Safety. 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 Google Safety by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP.

Is Google Safety safe?

Yes, Google Safety is a safe and legitimate crawler operated by Google. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309) and can be controlled with standard robots.txt rules.

Will blocking Google Safety hurt my SEO?

How do I block Google Safety in robots.txt?

Add the following lines to your /robots.txt file:

User-agent: Google-Safety
Disallow: /

This instructs Google Safety not to crawl any path on your site. To block only specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g., Disallow: /blog/).

Does Google Safety respect robots.txt?

Google Safety is operated by Google and is expected to fetch and parse /robots.txt before crawling, following RFC 9309. For hard enforcement, combine robots.txt with server-level IP or user-agent blocking.

How do I verify if Google Safety is crawling my site?

Search your web server access logs for the string Google-Safety (case-insensitive: grep -i "Google-Safety" /var/log/nginx/access.log). Filter by user-agent in your log analytics tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).