Google-CloudVertexBot: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What Google-CloudVertexBot is
Google-CloudVertexBot collects pages to train future models. It does not decide whether Google can cite you in an answer today — that is a different crawler with a different token. Blocking Google-CloudVertexBot is a decision about your content being learned from, not about your visibility.
Operator: Google
robots.txt token: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent on the wire: not published by the operator
Category: Model training
What blocking it actually costs
Blocks Vertex AI agents built by Google Cloud customers from ingesting your site on their owner's instruction.
How to block Google-CloudVertexBot
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
robots.txt is not the only thing that can block it
A permissive robots.txt does not mean Google-CloudVertexBot can reach you. WAF rules, Cloudflare's bot-management settings, rate limits and country blocks all sit in front of robots.txt and answer first. A site whose robots.txt welcomes Google-CloudVertexBot and whose edge returns 403 to it is blocked in every way that matters — and nothing in robots.txt will tell you so.
This is the gap the AI Crawler Access Checker was built to close: it reads robots.txt and sends a real request carrying the crawler's user-agent, so you see what the crawler sees.
Official documentation
Google documents Google-CloudVertexBot at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers.
Common questions
- What user-agent does Google-CloudVertexBot send?
Google does not publish an exact user-agent string for Google-CloudVertexBot. Match on the
Google-CloudVertexBottoken in robots.txt rather than on a full string you found elsewhere.- How do I block Google-CloudVertexBot?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot Disallow: /The group must name
Google-CloudVertexBoton its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one — under RFC 9309 the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking Google-CloudVertexBot cost me?
Blocks Vertex AI agents built by Google Cloud customers from ingesting your site on their owner's instruction.
- Can I tell a real Google-CloudVertexBot request from a fake one?
Not reliably. Google does not publish verified IP ranges for Google-CloudVertexBot, so the user-agent string is the only signal, and anyone can send it. Treat robots.txt as a statement of policy rather than as enforcement.
Is Google-CloudVertexBot blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it — a firewall rule can block Google-CloudVertexBot while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free