Google-Agent
Google-Agent is the name that agents running on Google's systems use when they visit websites to do something a person asked for. Google lists it among its user-triggered fetchers, visits started by a user's request, and says these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules because a person asked for the visit.
Source: Google Crawling Infrastructure, List of Google user-triggered fetchers (updated August 19, 2026), checked October 29, 2026
What Google-Agent means for your business
You'll spot it in your server logs as a visit whose browser name includes "Google-Agent," in both a phone and a desktop version. Google publishes the IP addresses these agents use in a file called user-triggered-agents.json, and warns that anyone can fake the name, so a real visit is one that matches Google's list.
Google says it's also trying out Web Bot Auth for these agents, a way for a bot to sign its visits, under the identity agent.bot.goog.
Since robots.txt generally won't stop it, we'd ask other questions. Can an agent read your prices, hours and booking steps without a login or a pop-up in the way? Do your forms work when the one filling them in isn't a person clicking? We'd test the pages an agent is most likely to need for your kind of business.
If Google-Agent shows up in your logs and you'd like to know what it can do there, testing your site the way an agent would use it is what our agent readiness work covers.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview answered about Google's AI agent products, like the Gemini agent, not the visitor name in your logs, citing Google Cloud, Google's blog and YouTube. ChatGPT did the same, then asked which of the two meanings we wanted.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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