Google recently updated its Google-Extended Web Tracker user agent documentation, reflecting product naming changes and clarifying the impact on search, which may be a concern for those who choose to block the tracker. The updated documentation provides clearer guidance on controlling access to content for use in training AI models.
Google Extended User Agent
Introduced on September 28, 2023, Google-Extended provides web publishers with a user agent that can be used to control how their sites are crawled. Publishers can allow or disallow the Google Extended User Agent using the Bots Opt-Out Protocol, giving them a way to opt out of having their content scraped and included in Google’s training datasets. i.a.
Google describes Google-Extended as a “self-contained product token”, but this is non-standard terminology for how publishers understand the concept of user agents.
The original ad described the new user agent:
“Today we’re announcing Google-Extended, a new control that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex’s generative AI APIs, including future generations of models that power those products.
By using Google-Extended to control access to a site’s content, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time.”
Google-Extended blocking is done with the “Google-Extended” user agent:
User Agent: Google-Extended Disallow: /
Google changelog
Google maintains a change log of important updates made to targeting and communication with web publishers and the search marketing community. The Google Developer Pages changelog announced a change to the Google-Extended documentation.
The revision comes after Bard’s name change to Gemini Apps, specifying that Google-Extended indexing now contributes to the generative APIs of Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. The new wording reassures publishers that this does not affect Google Search, addressing potential concerns about the potential implications of opting out of Google’s expanded AI data collection.
what changed
from Google change log clarifies that Google-Extended tracking is unique to Gemini Apps and has no impact on Google Search.
The changelog reports:
“Updated the description of the Google-Extended product token
What: With the name change from Bard to Gemini Apps, we clarified that Google-Extended affects Gemini Apps and, based on editor feedback, specified that Google-Extended does not affect Google Search.”
The updated guide no longer uses the Bard brand name, changing it to Gemini. And the following sentence was added:
“Google-Extended does not affect a site’s inclusion or ranking in Google Search.”
Read the updated Google tracker overview:
Overview of Google crawlers and retrievers (user agents)
Featured image by Shutterstock/Ribkhan
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