`AdsBot-Google`

Google's special-case crawlers page names AdsBot-Google as the robots.txt token for AdsBot. The page says AdsBot ignores the global robots.txt user agent (*) with the ad publisher's permission. Crawling preferences for this token affect Google Ads' ability to check web page ad quality. This check does not treat AdsBot-Google as a prefix of AdsBot-Google-Mobile. This check matches the whole token and still reports the RFC 9309 decision.

robots.txt token: AdsBot-Google
Operator: Google
Kind: ads_check
robots.txt: ignores_star. The vendor says this robot does not take the general User-agent: * rules in robots.txt into account.
HTTP user-agent: AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html) The page prints this string as the HTTP user agent. The robots.txt token is AdsBot-Google. AdsBot-Google-Mobile is a different token.
IP list: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/special-crawlers.json The page says special-case crawlers operate from a different range than the common crawlers, published in this file. The URL returned HTTP 200 on 2026-10-18, creationTime 2026-10-16. Botcard does not copy the prefixes. The page says the reverse DNS mask matches rate-limited-proxy-***-***-***-***.google.com. A user-agent string can be spoofed.
Source: List of Google's special-case crawlers. Retrieved 2026-10-18, page says updated 2026-09-17. CC BY 4.0 (Google Developers page, except as that page notes).

JSON

curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/v1/crawlers/adsbot-google

Check this token

tools/call with name check_robots is the same check at POST /mcp. The pasted file disallows AdsBot-Google on /docs and allows *. The call does not fetch a host.

curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/mcp -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"check_robots","arguments":{"robots_txt":"User-agent: AdsBot-Google\nDisallow: /\n\nUser-agent: *\nAllow: /\n","path":"/docs","ids":["adsbot-google"]}}}'

That call returns fetched_target false. This row is disallow via group AdsBot-Google, rule Disallow: /.