Googlebot

What Googlebot does

Googlebot discovers, fetches, and re-fetches pages to keep Google Search's index current. It is meticulously documented, verifiable by reverse DNS and published IP ranges, and honors robots.txt and crawl directives. Its crawl patterns respond to your site's freshness, structure, and perceived importance - the behavior the SEO industry has spent two decades learning to read. Because its name is the most spoofed on the web, verification matters: scrapers routinely wear Googlebot's user agent to get past naive bot filters.

Why it visits your site

Indexing for Search. Crawl frequency loosely tracks how often your content changes and how much Google values it.

The bigger picture: search engine crawlers

Search crawlers remain the one category with a decades-old, well-understood bargain: they consume crawl budget and return ranked visibility. Everything about them is comparatively mature - published IP ranges, verification methods, granular directives, webmaster consoles. Blocking them is almost always self-harm, which is precisely why they need to be cleanly separated from AI crawlers in your data: a blanket bot block that catches Googlebot costs you your organic channel.

The complication the AI era added is that search indexes now feed AI features too - AI Overviews draw on Google's index, Copilot on Bing's. Operators have answered with control tokens that split AI use from search use of the same crawl. The practical upshot: your lever for AI concerns is usually a token, not a block on the search crawler itself.

Should you block it?

Almost never - blocking Googlebot removes you from Google Search. The relevant modern question is subtler: Google Search data also feeds AI Overviews, and the Google-Extended token (not Googlebot itself) is the lever for AI training. That coupling - one crawler, several uses, separately controlled - is the pattern to understand, because Google's market power means its choices set the norms everyone else follows.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask Googlebot to stay away:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see Googlebot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Googlebot request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because Googlebot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Googlebot and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.