Google-InspectionTool

What user agent does Google-InspectionTool use?

Google publishes these user agent strings for Google-InspectionTool.

The first is the desktop agent, the second the mobile one. Google writes W.X.Y.Z where the Chrome version goes, because it changes: match that part with a wildcard.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)

How do I block Google-InspectionTool?

Google says its common crawlers always obey robots.txt when they crawl automatically. Google-InspectionTool also follows rules written for Googlebot.

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:

User-agent: Google-InspectionTool
Disallow: /

How do I check that a Google-InspectionTool visit is real?

Anyone can put a crawler’s name in a user agent, so the name alone proves nothing.

Google publishes the IP ranges its common crawlers use. A reverse DNS lookup of a genuine request’s IP address gives a host name under googlebot.com, and a forward lookup of that name returns the same address.

Spreelytics runs this check for you. Every crawl that claims to be Google-InspectionTool is compared with the IP ranges Google publishes, refreshed every 12 hours, and one from outside them counts as spoofed.

How do I see Google-InspectionTool visits on my site?

Your server’s access logs record the user agent of each request, so you can search them for “Google-InspectionTool”.

Or add the Spreelytics server middleware, @spreelytics/ai-crawl. It recognises Google-InspectionTool by its user agent and counts each visit on the Bots page under Indexing, apart from your visitor numbers.

Sources: developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-common-crawlers#google-inspection-tool, developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verify-google-requests