What is Google-Extended?
Google-Extended is Google's AI training crawler. Controls whether Google may train Gemini on your content. Blocking it does NOT affect Google Search or AI Overviews.
What does Google-Extended do with your content?
Controls whether Google may train Gemini on your content. Blocking it does NOT affect Google Search or AI Overviews. Like most AI crawlers, Google-Extended reads your pages as plain HTML — it does not run JavaScript — so content that only appears after scripts execute is invisible to it.
Should you block Google-Extended?
Blocking Google-Extended only opts your content out of Gemini model training. It does NOT remove you from Google Search or from AI Overviews — both of those run on Googlebot. If your goal is staying visible in Google while opting out of model training, blocking Google-Extended is a reasonable, low-risk choice.
How do you allow or block Google-Extended in robots.txt?
Add one of these snippets to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. The first explicitly allows Google-Extended everywhere; the second blocks it completely.
# Allow Google-Extended
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
# Block Google-Extended
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /Is robots.txt enough?
Not always. CDNs and firewalls (Cloudflare in particular) can block crawlers at the network level regardless of what robots.txt says — Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default for many accounts. If you want Google-Extended to reach your site, check your CDN's bot settings too. SeeGeo's free audit checks both.
Frequently asked questions
What is Google-Extended?
Google-Extended is Google's AI training crawler. Controls whether Google may train Gemini on your content. Blocking it does NOT affect Google Search or AI Overviews.
Should I block Google-Extended?
Blocking Google-Extended only opts your content out of Gemini model training. It does NOT remove you from Google Search or from AI Overviews — both of those run on Googlebot.
Does Google-Extended run JavaScript?
No. Google-Extended, like most AI crawlers, reads raw HTML without executing JavaScript. If your content only renders client-side, it is effectively invisible to it.
Does blocking Google-Extended affect Google Search rankings?
No. Google-Extended only controls Gemini model training. Google Search and AI Overviews use Googlebot, so blocking Google-Extended has no effect on either.