Googlebot
Google's main web crawler, which reads pages for Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Googlebot is Google's main web crawler. It reads the pages of the web so Google can index them and show them in Search. That includes Google's AI features in Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which answer from pages in Google's index.
If Googlebot can't read a page, Google can't show it in its results, and its AI features can't use it either.
Googlebot and Google-Extended
Google also has a token called Google-Extended. No crawler by that name visits your site. Google-Extended is a name you can use in your robots.txt to tell Google whether pages it has crawled may be used for its Gemini models.
The two do different jobs. Blocking Googlebot keeps a page out of Google Search, AI Overviews included. Blocking Google-Extended is about Gemini, and Google says it doesn't change how your site appears in Search. Google lists all its crawlers and tokens on its crawlers page.
For example, a publisher that doesn't want its articles used to train Gemini can add a rule for Google-Extended and still keep a rule that lets Googlebot in, so its pages stay in Search.
Checking a request really is Googlebot
Anyone can call their bot Googlebot. Google publishes the addresses its crawlers use, and a real Googlebot request comes from an address that looks up to a googlebot.com or google.com host name. Google explains how to check this in Verifying Googlebot.
In AnswerOrbit
Googlebot is one of the 42 AI bots the Audit tab checks your robots.txt for. When you connect your server logs, the Bot visits tab counts a Googlebot visit only when its address is on Google's own list, or looks up to Google's host names. Requests that fail the check show as Unverified requests. See Website and AI traffic.