What is Google-Safety?
Google-Safety is a specialized security crawler that performs abuse-specific scanning to detect malware and other security threats on publicly posted links across Google properties, operating independently of robots.txt restrictions. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Google-Safety visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | September 14, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Google-Safety's cadence depends on how the scan is configured. Continuous monitoring may run daily or hourly, while a one-time or internet-wide scan may sweep once and disappear.
Google-Safety's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Safety; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
How To Block Google-Safety With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Google-Safety from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all security scanners at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Google-Safety # https://knownagents.com/agents/google-safety
Disallow: /Insights for Google-Safety
As of September 14, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
6% of top websites block Google-Safety in their robots.txts.
Overall Security Scanner Traffic
0.0% of all web traffic came from security scanners.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Google-Safety.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Google-Safety?
Usually not, unless you already run your own security scans and want cleaner logs. Google-Safety checks for exposed vulnerabilities, and some services report their findings to site owners at no cost. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Google-Safety.
Does Google-Safety Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Google-Safety is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Google-Safety respects it.
Does Google-Safety Access Private Content?
It deliberately looks for exposed private content. Google-Safety tests login pages, admin panels, and API endpoints for vulnerabilities. Probing does not mean it gained access, but you should expect requests to sensitive paths in your logs.
How Can I Tell if Google-Safety Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from Google-Safety and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using Google-Safety's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Google-Safety". Look for bursts of requests to uncommon paths that ordinary visitors rarely access. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be Google-Safety.
Why Is Google-Safety Visiting My Website?
Google-Safety is scanning your site for vulnerabilities, either as part of an internet-wide sweep or because someone requested an assessment of your domain. Recurring visits often indicate that a monitoring service has added your site to its checks.