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. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 10, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
Google-Safety's pattern depends on who pointed it at you. Continuous monitoring services check daily or even hourly, while a one time assessment sweeps once and disappears. Expect requests aimed at login pages, admin paths, APIs, and configuration files, because exposed ones are what scanners exist to find.
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 entire 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: /Google-Safety Global Insights
As of July 10, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
1% of top websites block Google-Safety in their robots.txt files.
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?
Not unless you already run your own scanning and want cleaner logs. Google-Safety checks websites for exposed vulnerabilities, and some scanning services report what they find to site owners for free. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for Google-Safety.
Does Google-Safety Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. Google-Safety is expected to honor robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms Google-Safety actually honors it.
Does Google-Safety Access Private Content?
It probes for private content deliberately. Login pages, admin panels, and API endpoints are exactly what Google-Safety tests, because exposed ones are what it exists to find. Probing is not the same as getting in, but expect requests to sensitive paths in your logs.
Why Is Google-Safety Visiting My Website?
Google-Safety is scanning your site for vulnerabilities, either as part of a sweep across the whole internet or because someone requested an assessment of your domain. Recurring visits usually mean a monitoring service has you on its list.
How Can I Tell if Google-Safety Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Google-Safety visits and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper alongside it, then authenticates each visit against Google-Safety's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "Google-Safety". Look for probes of login, admin, and API paths. A log match is still not proof, because any bot can claim to be Google-Safety.