GoogleOther crawler introduced by Google

[phranque]

there is a new user-agent named GoogleOther being used by Google for non-Search index related crawls.
other than the name and purpose, it is essentially the same crawler as and uses the same technology and infrastructure as googlebot.

you can see the description of the new crawler in Google Search Central's Overview of Google crawlers (user agents) [developers.google.com].

the new user agent was introduced in a LinkedIn post by Gary Illyes [linkedin.com]:

As we optimize how and what Googlebot crawls, one thing we wanted to ensure is that Googlebot's crawl jobs are only used internally for building the index that's used by Search. For this we added a new crawler, GoogleOther, that will replace some of Googlebot's other jobs like R&D crawls to free up some crawl capacity for Googlebot.

i noticed this "interesting" assumption stated:

This is a no-op change for you, ...

[phranque]

This is a no-op change for you, ...

at the least there may be considerations where holes have been poked for googlebot in robots.txt, .htaccess or config files, or elsewhere in your application.
or if/wherever you are blocking googlebot, for that matter.

[SumGuy]

Any idea if hits from this new bot will be coming from the same 66.249.x.x IP's as the standard googlebot?

Most likely this new google-other bot is scraping material for use (training) for google's AI products and services.

[tangor]

Looks like two different priorities are being explored. Which we want to embrace (for the serps and organic traffic) will have to be discovered over time.

[Ralph_Slate]

I find Google very frustrating because they seem to freely swap their IPs between search, Adsense (rate-limited-proxy/Mediapartners-Google), and Google Cloud (googleusercontent).

So what happens is that if I whitelist a Search IP, I can find someone scripting with it from Google Cloud later on. Or vice-versa.

I also strongly believe that they use non-Google IPs to do AdX ad verification, without identifying themselves at all.

[tangor]

I also strongly believe that they use non-Google IPs to do AdX ad verification, without identifying themselves at all.

ALL OF THEM have that stealth capability!