Google-Read-Aloud

What user agent does Google-Read-Aloud use?

Google publishes these user agent strings for Google-Read-Aloud.

The first is the mobile agent, the second the desktop one. Its older name, google-speakr, is deprecated.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)

How do I block Google-Read-Aloud?

Google says robots.txt cannot opt you out, because Read Aloud only fetches a page when a person asks. It reads a meta tag instead.

Add this to the head of each page you want left out:

<meta name="google" content="nopagereadaloud">

How do I check that a Google-Read-Aloud 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 user-triggered fetchers use. A reverse DNS lookup of a genuine request’s IP address gives a host name under google.com or gae.googleusercontent.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-Read-Aloud 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-Read-Aloud visits on my site?

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

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

Sources: developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/read-aloud-user-agent, developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-user-triggered-fetchers#google-read-aloud, developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verify-google-requests