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Google-Extended: What It Controls (and What It Doesn't)

Google-Extended is not a separate crawler — it’s a robots.txt control token. Googlebot does the crawling either way; Google-Extended tells Google whether that crawled content may be used for Gemini training and AI grounding. The critical fact: blocking it does not affect your Google Search rankings, and allowing it doesn’t improve them.

How it works

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# Allow Gemini to use your content (recommended for visibility)
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /


# Opt out of Gemini training/grounding — Search unaffected
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

There is no Google-Extended user agent string in your server logs — you’ll only ever see Googlebot. The token exists purely as a directive namespace.

The two common mistakes

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  1. Blocking Googlebot to “stop Google’s AI”. That removes you from Google Search entirely — catastrophic. Use the Google-Extended token instead.
  2. Blocking Google-Extended “to protect rankings”. It doesn’t protect anything ranking-related; it only mutes you in Gemini answers and AI-grounded features.

Note that AI Overviews in Google Search are governed by Search indexing, not by Google-Extended — appearing (or not) there follows your normal Search presence. What Google-Extended governs is Gemini the assistant and grounding of AI answers on your content.

Should you allow it?

Section titled “Should you allow it?”

For visibility: yes. Gemini ships default-on across Android, Chrome and Workspace — a recommendation surface most businesses can’t afford to mute for zero ranking benefit in return. The opt-out exists for publishers with licensing positions; that’s who it’s for.

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