// Search engines
The painted mark for Google
Placeholder: mark still to be painted

Google

Googlebot, GoogleOther, Google-InspectionTool…

Googlebot reads pages so they can turn up in Google Search. Google has other crawlers too, for Google Images, shopping, ads and product research. Whether pages may be used for Google's AI (Gemini) is controlled by a separate robots.txt name, Google-Extended; it is a rule, not a separate visitor.

Worth knowing: Googlebot nowadays reads the web as a smartphone. Since Google's switch to “mobile-first indexing”, the phone version of a page is the one that counts in its search results.

Why? To keep an up to date copy of the web, so they can show it in their results and sell advertising beside them. More and more, the same copy also feeds their AI answers.