# APIs-Google

Google's special-case crawlers page says these crawlers are used where there is an agreement between the site and the product. The robots.txt token is APIs-Google. The page says the global user agent (*) is ignored. Crawling preferences for this token affect delivery of push notification messages by Google APIs. The list is not exhaustive. This check matches the whole token and still reports the RFC 9309 decision.

- Operator: Google
- Kind: owner_requested
- 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: APIs-Google (+https://developers.google.com/webmasters/APIs-Google.html) The page prints this string as the HTTP user agent. The robots.txt token is the same string, APIs-Google.
- IP list: https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/special-crawlers.json
- Source: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-special-case-crawlers (retrieved 2026-10-18)

## JSON

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

## Check this token

tools/call with name check_robots is the same check at https://whosthatbot.com/mcp. Send `Content-Type: application/json` and `Accept: application/json, text/event-stream`. The pasted file disallows APIs-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: APIs-Google\nDisallow: /\n\nUser-agent: *\nAllow: /\n","path":"/docs","ids":["apis-google"]}}}'
```

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

Each card paraphrases the linked vendor page and was checked on source.retrieved. This is not legal advice. robots.txt is a request from the site owner. Botcard does not fetch third-party sites and does not suggest ways around a disallow rule.