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User-triggered

Should you block GoogleAgent-URLContext?

GoogleAgent-URLContext is operated by Google. Fetches your page because a human asked an assistant to open it right now. Blocking it breaks a live request.

All 54 AI crawlers

What GoogleAgent-URLContext is

Google runs it as a user-triggered fetcher, which means it fetches one page at the moment a person asks an assistant to open it. There is no index and no schedule: somebody has pasted your link or asked for your site by name, and is waiting for the answer while the request happens.

What blocking it costs you: A developer who passes your URL to the Gemini API as context gets nothing back, and usually blames their own code rather than your robots.txt. A link somebody pasted into an assistant fails while they are watching. They asked for your page by name and got an error.

The user agent, and the token a rule matches on

These are two different strings and confusing them is why a rule that looks right does nothing. A robots.txt rule matches on the product token, case-insensitively, and ignores the rest of the user-agent header entirely.

robots.txt tokenGoogleAgent-URLContext
OperatorGoogle
CategoryUser-triggered
Full user agentNot published by Google. Match on the token above.

Where an operator has not published the exact string, this page says so rather than inventing a plausible one. A user agent you can grep your logs for is worth nothing if it is a guess.

Allowing GoogleAgent-URLContext

Paste this into robots.txt at the root of your domain.

User-agent: GoogleAgent-URLContext
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://axray.online/sitemap.xml

An empty Disallow: and Allow: / mean the same thing to a crawler. What does not mean the same thing is having no rule at all: absence is permission by default, but it is permission nobody wrote down, and it survives only until somebody adds a blanket User-agent: * block without thinking about this crawler.

Blocking GoogleAgent-URLContext

User-agent: GoogleAgent-URLContext
Disallow: /

Before you paste that: a developer who passes your URL to the Gemini API as context gets nothing back, and usually blames their own code rather than your robots.txt. That is the cost, and it is paid silently — no error appears in your logs, no report tells you, and the traffic you lose was traffic you never saw arrive.

How the web actually treats GoogleAgent-URLContext

Measured on 2026-09-06, by reading the robots.txt of 292 public websites and resolving each one against this crawler specifically.

VerdictSitesShare
Blocked62%
Explicitly allowed23279%
No rule either way5418%

No site is named, here or anywhere else on this domain. The count is the useful part; a league table of businesses that never asked to be measured is not.

The row worth reading twice is the last one. 54 of 292 sites have written no rule about GoogleAgent-URLContext at all, which means their position on it is an accident rather than a decision — whatever their User-agent: * block happens to say.

What GoogleAgent-URLContext is not

Google runs 6 other crawlers with different jobs, and this is where the expensive mistake happens. Somebody means “do not train on my content”, writes one rule against the operator’s name as they remember it, and blocks the crawler that would have sent them a customer instead.

CrawlerWhat it does instead
Google-NotebookLM Fetches your page because a human asked an assistant to open it right now. Blocking it breaks a live request.
GoogleAgent-Mariner Browses, compares and buys on a person’s behalf. Blocking it removes you from the shortlist before anyone sees it.
Gemini-Deep-Research Browses, compares and buys on a person’s behalf. Blocking it removes you from the shortlist before anyone sees it.
Googlebot Traditional search indexing, increasingly the substrate AI answers are built on.
Google-Gemini-CLI Reads documentation while a developer is building against you. Blocking it is how your API gets used wrong.
Google-Extended Collects content for model training. Blocking it is a legitimate business choice with no traffic cost.

Rules are matched per token. Blocking one of these says nothing about the others, which is the point: you can refuse training and keep every crawler that puts your link in front of a person.

Checking what your site does right now

Reading your own robots.txt is not the same as knowing what a crawler concludes from it. Precedence between a User-agent: * group and a named one, the longest-match rule between overlapping paths, and a token you spelled slightly wrong all produce a file that looks correct and behaves otherwise.

npx axray-cli your-site.com

The scan resolves your file against all 54 crawlers on this list individually and reports which ones are allowed, blocked, or covered by nothing. It is free, needs no account, and installs nothing.

Questions people ask about GoogleAgent-URLContext

What is GoogleAgent-URLContext?

GoogleAgent-URLContext is a user-triggered fetcher operated by Google: it fetches one page at the moment a person asks an assistant to open it. There is no index and no schedule: somebody has pasted your link or asked for your site by name, and is waiting for the answer while the request happens.

Should I block GoogleAgent-URLContext in robots.txt?

Only if you are willing to pay what it costs. A developer who passes your URL to the Gemini API as context gets nothing back, and usually blames their own code rather than your robots.txt. A link somebody pasted into an assistant fails while they are watching. They asked for your page by name and got an error.

What is the GoogleAgent-URLContext user agent string?

Google does not publish a full user-agent string for this crawler. The robots.txt product token is GoogleAgent-URLContext, and that is what a rule matches on; matching is case-insensitive.

How do I check whether my site is blocking GoogleAgent-URLContext right now?

Scan your site with AXRAY. It resolves your robots.txt against 54 named AI crawlers individually rather than reporting one verdict for all of them, so it will tell you whether this specific crawler is allowed, blocked, or covered by no rule at all. It is free and needs no account.

Other user-triggered fetchers

The full reference: all 54 AI crawlers, and who blocks each one.

See which of these 54 crawlers your own site is blocking, and what each one costs you. One scan, no account.