Googlebot (Desktop)

Googlebot (Desktop) is assigned to the Search category by BotScope. Detection is based on the user-agent string. Current pattern:

Googlebot(?![-/]Image|[-/]Video|[-/]News)

⭐ Googlebot (Desktop) is the historically older, secondary index crawler. Until 2018 it was the primary crawler, then replaced by Mobile-First. Today it crawls significantly less often than the smartphone variant but remains active for desktop-specific features (e.g. featured snippets in desktop SERPs).

Search engine crawlers index publicly available content for their results. They typically fetch /robots.txt first and respect crawl-delay and Disallow rules. High crawl frequency usually correlates with good visibility in those search results.

In the BotScope dashboard you see for Googlebot (Desktop): top paths, status distribution, byte volume and whether the user-agent signature stays stable over time or rotates.

robots.txt directive for Googlebot (Desktop)

If you don't want Googlebot (Desktop) to crawl your site, add the following block to your /robots.txt. This works only for bots that honour robots.txt — malicious crawlers ignore it.