Google has fixed a typo in their crawler documentation that inadvertently misidentified one of their crawlers.

In general, this is a minor issue but it’s a major issue for SEOs and publishers who depend on the documentation to set firewall rules.

Failure to notate the correct data could cause a website to inadvertently block a legitimate Google crawler.

Google Inspection Tool

The typo is in the section of the documentation about the Google Inspection Tool.

This is an important crawler that is sent out to a website in response to two prompts.

1. URL inspection functionality in Search Console
When a user wants to check within search console whether a webpage is indexed or to request indexing, Google’s system responds with the Google Inspection Tool crawler.

The URL inspection tool offers the following functionality:

  • See the status of a URL in the Google index
  • Inspect a live URL
  • Request indexing for a URL
  • View a rendered version of the page
  • View loaded resources, JavaScript…

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