Google-CloudVertexBot: Google's search crawler
Google-CloudVertexBot crawls a site when its owner asks, to build a Vertex AI agent on it. Google says it has no effect on Search.
Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.
At a glance
Google-CloudVertexBot in one table
- Company
- What it's for
- Search index: read into the index an ai assistant searches.
- robots.txt token
Google-CloudVertexBot- Full user agent
- Google publishes the token only, not the full string.
- Follows robots.txt
- Follows it. Google's common crawlers always respect robots.txt for automatic crawls.
- How to verify
- Check the visitor's IP against the list Google publishes. A request outside it isn't Google-CloudVertexBot, whatever its user agent says. The IP list
- Source
- Google's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
robots.txt
Allow Google-CloudVertexBot
Allow it. It builds the index Google's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBotAllow: /Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether Google-CloudVertexBot reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From Google's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
Google-CloudVertexBot crawls a site when its owner asks, to build a Vertex AI agent on it. Google says it has no effect on Search.
Google's common crawlers always respect robots.txt for automatic crawls.
Check the visitor's IP against the list Google publishes. A request outside it isn't Google-CloudVertexBot, whatever its user agent says.
Allow it. It builds the index Google's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
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