Web hits from googlewifi (?)

Some sort of new-fangled home router?

[SumGuy]

Got a hit to my website today from 64.9.239.X. RDNS is user-64-9-239-x.googlewifi.com.

Never heard of googlewifi before. I do some searching, seems that google is getting into the home router business. Because there just aren't enough of them already?

What ticks me off - ok fine, google can dick around with hardware like routers. But why route all your traffic through their servers? When you've got a google router in your home, it looks like a proxy now. So I have no way to know where the actual IP the hit came from.

I'm going to be blocking this. I don't need this garbage in my logs. I'll shoot them a 403. If they want to browse my site, they'll do it from somewhere I can see them.

[tangor]

G proxies have been eating my lunch for some time ... dang difficult to do any kind of site analysis with that third party in the middle...

[lucy24]

:: detour to logs ::

Oh, gosh, will you look at that. Mine are 64.9.251.blahblah, which is the same sector (224/19, i.e. 224-255, GOOGLEWIFI), first seen in February, UA always some kind of Android Pixel.

:: further detour to headers ::

Nope, no luck. I was hoping for some kind of X-forwarded-for or From header.

And what the heck is Pixel? I never noticed the element before, but it's ubiquitous. Or, at least, it’s approaching 1% of current androids. With the number of androids around, that can count as ubiquitous.

[tangor]

G is taking over the web by stealth proxies ... they offer a few free every day ... and they change constantly. Making me crazy!

[tangor]

@SumGuy ... prepare of the long haul of "whack-a-mole" g offers these proxies every day and the ranges change constantly. Most likely these are human visitors, but you can't TELL for sure ... so analytics are put in a cocked hat! I have ot yet made up my mind how to deal with this, but I have implemented a COMPARE in my log analysis for this new beastie.

[SumGuy]

I assume that anything from a G-assigned IP that claims UA to be GoogleBot is really a bot and not a proxy. If so, I see very little that could be a G proxy. I think MS/Bing does more of that stuff - I forget what the call it - view from search result. In my OP, the hit was also from a Pixel 3 - I think that's a phone? I have 1 other instance of a hit from a Pixel 3 (from a month or 2 ago, from a Verizon IP) and I think it's the same user. I guess if you have a Pixel 3 you're probably a real Google Fanboi and hence having a google wifi router at home would not be unusual.

[tangor]

YMMV, but my lookups return google.proxy on about 90% ... Just sayin'.

Then again, every site is different, and traffic to each is different as well. If we could figure it all out, we'd be happy campers. :)

[tangor]

That 90% is on google ips that do NOT say googlebot in the UA ... just to make sure we are not talking about two different things!

[lucy24]

Google Proxy IPs have been around for ages--again, various androids--but Google Wifi seems to be new. Ish.

[iamlost]

I thought at first that it would be the Google Wifi mesh router (and a Google Pixel mobile) however it appears googlewifi dot com is registered to MarkMonitor, which 'protects' online brands and is owned by Clarivate Analytics, which also owns Compumark and recently merged with Churchill Capital Corp. The new 4-billion plus merged combine to be known as Clarivate and be listed on NYSE.

So it's just another nosey data intelligence bot. Or a bored employee.