Google-Extended vs Googlebot: What Each One Controls
Blocking the wrong Google token is one of the most common AI SEO mistakes. One controls Gemini, the other controls Search and its AI features.
What you’ll learn
- What Googlebot and Google-Extended actually do
- Why Google-Extended doesn’t remove you from AI Overviews
- Which controls really affect AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Safe robots.txt examples for common goals
Google uses one crawler for Search and a separate control token for its AI models. Mixing them up can either remove you from Google Search or leave you exactly where you didn’t want to be.
Two different things
| Name | What it is | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
Googlebot |
The crawler that fetches pages | Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode |
Google-Extended |
A robots.txt token, not a separate crawler | Whether content crawled by Google can be used to train Gemini models and to ground Gemini answers |
Google-Extended never visits your site on its own. Googlebot does the crawling, and the token only tells Google how it may use what Googlebot already fetched.
What blocking each one does
- Blocking
Googlebotremoves pages from Google Search. They disappear from regular results and from AI Overviews and AI Mode, because those features are built on the Search index. - Blocking
Google-Extendedkeeps your content out of Gemini training and Gemini grounding. Your Search rankings and your presence in AI Overviews stay the same.
That second point surprises many site owners: Google-Extended is not an AI Overviews opt-out.
What does control AI Overviews and AI Mode
nosnippetandmax-snippetlimit the text Google can show, including in AI features.data-nosnippeton an element keeps that part of a page out of snippets and AI answers.- Since June 2026, Search Console has a setting that excludes a site from Google’s generative AI features entirely. It is all or nothing, and pages excluded this way get no impressions or clicks from those features.
robots.txt examples
Stay in Search and AI features, opt out of Gemini training:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Allow: /Keep a private section out of everything Google does:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/Never block Googlebot for the whole site unless you really want to leave Google Search.
Check your setup
The AI Crawler Checker shows how your robots.txt treats Googlebot, Google-Extended and 20 other AI bots, and the AI robots.txt Generator builds the rules from checkboxes.