GoogleOther
GoogleOther is Google's general-purpose crawler, used by its product teams for things like research crawls. It isn't tied to Google Search.
GoogleOther is a general-purpose crawler that Google's product teams use to fetch public pages for their own projects, such as one-off crawls for research and development. Google lists it in its common crawlers page, along with two variants, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, for images and videos.
It turns up in server logs often enough to cause worry. Most of the time, there's nothing to worry about.
What it's for, and what it isn't
Google says crawling preferences addressed to GoogleOther don't affect any specific product. Google Search crawls with Googlebot, and Gemini's use of your content has its own token, Google-Extended.
So if you block GoogleOther in robots.txt, your Google Search results shouldn't change, and neither should AI Overviews. Like Google's other common crawlers, it follows robots.txt when it crawls.
Should you block it?
There's rarely a strong reason to. It doesn't decide where you show up, and blocking it takes away a way for Google teams to read your public pages.
People usually look into GoogleOther because of load. For example, say Fernhill Coffee's logs show a burst of GoogleOther requests on its product pages one afternoon. That's normal, and as long as the site handles it, there's nothing to do. If a crawl ever strains your server, a robots.txt rule for GoogleOther only stops that crawler and leaves Googlebot alone.
Check it's really Google
Anyone can call their bot GoogleOther. Google publishes the addresses its crawlers use, so you can check that a request is genuine before you trust it or act on it.
In AnswerOrbit, the Bot visits tab in Website checks every request before counting it, and shows those that fail as Unverified requests.