The article argues that most traffic identified as Googlebot is actually from malicious bots impersonating Google's crawler by faking the User-Agent header. It explains that since the User-Agent field is self-declared and not verified, attackers can easily mimic Googlebot to overload websites or mislead site owners.
Background
Googlebot is Google's official web crawler used for indexing pages in search results, but its identity can be spoofed in HTTP headers. This has led to confusion when sites experience high traffic they assume comes from Google, when it may actually be from bad actors.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Jul 27, 2026 at 06:40 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10