Googlebot-IA is Google Scholar's specialized crawler that indexes scholarly literature from academic publishers, repositories, and university websites to populate the academic search engine with research papers and publications.

At a glance

Operator: Google
Type: Search Engine
RSL category: search

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.
IP ranges: The operator publishes the addresses it crawls from, and Centinel checks the client address against that list.
Reverse DNS: The client address resolves to a hostname the operator controls, and that hostname resolves back to the same address.

A request that passes one of these checks is Googlebot-IA itself. One that only matches the user agent is reported as unverified. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Search Engine.

Back to the crawler catalog