Google-Extended Crawler: Control How AI Crawls Your Site

0:00 Google-Extended Crawler What It Is
Your robots, text file is making decisions about AI data access right now, whether you wrote those rules intentionally or not, we’re walking through exactly what Google extended is, how it differs from the crawler controlling your search rankings, and how to make a deliberate choice about who trains AI models on your content. This is PushLeads, and this is your complete guide to Google extended. Quick pause for context, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads and helping local business owners and marketers win and search is what I do all day. My first sites hit Google’s first page back in 2007, and I never stopped. What we’re doing in this video is Google extended crawler. Only 5 .6 % of the top 10 ,000 domains have explicit rules for Google extended in their robots. TXT files roughly 94 out of every 100 websites have made no deliberate choice about this crawler. They’re open by default and default is not a strategy.

1:00 Why 94 Percent of Sites Have No Rules
It’s just the absence of one Google announced Google extended in September 2023 to give publishers a clean documented way to separate AI training access from search crawling. Before that, there was no easy mechanism to say yes to search indexing and no to AI data collection simultaneously. Google extended reads your published pages and sends that content to Google to train Gemini and future AI products. It’s completely separate from Google bot uses a different user agent token and follows its own robots, text rules, it’s an officially documented fully supported feature, Google bot and Google extended are two different crawlers with two completely different jobs.

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

1:46 Google-Extended vs Googlebot Key Differences
Google bot crawls and indexes your site for Google search. It affects your rankings and drives referral traffic. Blocking it removes you from search results entirely. Google extended does none of that. It’s only job is collecting content for AI model training. It has zero effect on your search rankings, your maps listing, or any other Google search product. Blocking it is completely safe. The two follow separate directives in your robots, TXD, and blocking one has absolutely no effect on the other. Every website already has a robots, text file talking to every crawler that visits including Google extended. If you’ve never added an explicit rule for it, the file isn’t staying neutral. Silence means open access, no rule equals full permission. The product token is simply Google extended, two lines in your robots. Text puts you in complete control of that pipeline without touching anything related to search.

2:42 robots.txt Six-Step Setup Guide
Step one, find your robots. Text file at your domain slash robots .txt, open it in any text editor. Step two, add the user agent block type user agent, Google extended on its own line. Step three, write the disallow directive, disallow blocks the entire site, or use specific paths like slash blog slash to protect only certain sections. Step four, save and upload the file, replacing the existing version at your domain route. Step five, open Google search console, find the robots, text a report under settings, and confirm the file reads exactly as you wrote it. Step six, use the URL inspection tool to verify Googlebot can still reach your pages.

3:29 AI Crawler Referral Ratios Why They Matter
The crawler referral ratio for AI training crawlers is staggering. Google search runs at roughly 14 to one 14 pages crawled for every visit returned through rankings. That’s a reasonable exchange. Anthropics crawler ran at 73 ,000 to one in June 2025, according to Cloudflare data. 73 ,000 pages consumed for every single referral visit returned to publishers. For any business, depending on website traffic to generate leads, that math matters enormously. The publisher response is measurable and growing fast. Cloudflare’s analysis of the top 10 ,000 domains shows GPT bot is the most frequently blocked AI crawler with 312 of those domains blocking it. Google extended ranks third at 5 .6 % of analyzed robots. Txt files, Cloudbot is now blocked by approximately 5 .8 million websites. Up from 3 .2 million is recently as July 2025. Publishers have figured out that targeted AI crawler control is real, effective, and carries no search ranking risk.

4:40 Publisher Blocking Trends and Data
Harry Clarkson Bennett, SEO director at the telegraph, put it plainly, publishers are blocking AI bots using the robots, text because there is almost no value exchange, large language models are not designed to send referral traffic, and publishers still need traffic to survive. That logic applies equally to a local contractor, a boutique, a photographer, or any small business whose website content drives revenue. 79 % of top US and UK news websites now block at least one AI training crawler. The overall blocking rate increased 336 % over the prior year. According to Tolbit’s second quarter 2025 report, Cloudbot alone crossed 5 .8 million blocked sites in a matter of months. This is not a fringe concern. It’s a mainstream business decision publishers across every size and sector are actively making.

5:35 Your Content Is a Real Business Asset
A handwritten guide about local renovation costs, a detailed service page explaining your process, a portfolio of completed projects, that content took real expertise and real time to produce. AI training systems find exactly that kind of specific, locally grounded content valuable. They consume it, train on it, and send no traffic back to the business that created it. If your website generates leads, your content is a real business asset. Making a deliberate decision about who can train AI models on that asset is part of protecting your business, not just a technical detail.

6:11 Other AI Crawlers and Their Tokens
Google Extended is one crawler in a much larger ecosystem. GPT bot is OpenAI’s training crawler and the most frequently blocked across the web. CC bot is common crawls bot used by multiple AI companies. And the second most blocked, Cloudbot is anthropics crawler for CloudAI. Bitespider is Bitesdance’s crawler associated with TikTok’s parent company. Each uses its own user agent token, meaning each needs its own separate disallow block. A catch -all, disallowing everything would block Googlebot 2, removing your site from search entirely. Be specific with every token. One common question, does blocking Google Extended remove you from AI overviews? Probably not directly. AI overviews appear to pull from a content. Googlebot has already indexed Google Extended Feeds model training pipelines. Those are separate processes. Google has not publicly documented a direct link between blocking Google Extended and exclusion from AI overviews. The reliable path to AI generated search features is well -structured content with schema markup, clear headings, and direct answers near the top of your pages, with Googlebot able to access everything.

7:25 Verifying Your robots.txt in GSC
Writing the robots. Text rules is step one. Confirming they work as expected is step two. Open Google Search Console, find the robots, text report under settings, and confirm the file reads exactly as you wrote it. Check for conflicting rules, the specific block wins over a catch -all. Use the URL inspection tool to confirm Googlebot can still reach your pages. To verify a visitor claiming to be Google Extended, run a reverse DNS lookup. The host name should end in Googlebot. Calm or Google. Calm. Then run a forward DNS lookup to confirm it returns the original IP. So if you’re not confident your file is correct, a technical SEO audit shows exactly what every crawler sees. Every AI crawler and its exact token. Google extended for Google’s AI training. Safe to block. No ranking impact. GPT bot for OpenAI. Most frequently blocked across the web. Cloud bot for Anthropic. 5 .8 million sites block it. CC bot for common crawl. Second most blocked overall. Bitespider for byte dance requires its own separate block. The golden rule never use a catch -all user agent asterisk disallow. That one line blocks everything including Googlebot and removes your site from search entirely. List each AI crawler with its own explicit block and keep your Googlebot rules completely separate. Your robots. Text is making AI access decisions for your business right now. Whether you intended it to or not. Google extended GPT bot. Cloud bot. And others visit sites across the web every single day. Most small business sites have no explicit rules for any of them, which means they’re open by default. A clear robots text strategy lets you keep full Google search visibility while deciding exactly which AI systems can train on the content you worked hard to create. That is a real business decision. See exactly where your visibility stands with a free teardown. Find the link in the description or call 828 -348 -7686.