robots.txt: refuse GoogleOther - #5
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Google's non-Search crawler walked every filter combination of /api/v1/search and search.csv, 134 unpaid 402s in an hour on dev2. It indexes nothing for Search, so refusing it by name costs no ranking; an IP ban on 66.249.x would take Googlebot down with it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ralyodio
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Sep 25, 2026
robots.txt refuses it since #5, but Google caches robots.txt for up to a day, and meanwhile it walks every filter combination of /servers and /api/v1/search at ~120/min. Answer it in the gate with a few bytes and no data. robots.txt stays readable so it can learn the refusal; Googlebot is untouched. Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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GoogleOther (Google's non-Search crawler, verified
crawl-66-249-73-*.googlebot.com) sent 134 unpaid requests to/api/v1/searchand/api/v1/search.csvin about an hour on dev2 today, walking every filter combination and getting 402 each time. Our robots.txt only refused the AI training bots, so for everyone else/api/v1/searchwas open.This adds
User-agent: GoogleOther / Disallow: /via the gateway'srefusedoption. Googlebot (Search) keeps the wildcard rules, so ranking is unaffected. We refuse by name rather than by IP because Googlebot crawls from the same 66.249.x addresses.Tests: 59 pass, including a new check that GoogleOther is refused and
*is still allowed.🤖 Generated with Claude Code