Google
Search Engineby Google
Googlebot-Image
Google's dedicated image crawler, used for indexing images in Google Image Search. It respects robots.txt and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
Respects robots.txt
Yes
Can be blocked
Yes
Crawl-Delay support
No
Type
Search Engine
Purpose
Google Image Search indexing
SEO Impact
Blocking this crawler removes your images from Google Image Search, which can be a significant traffic source for visual content sites.
User-Agent String
Googlebot-Image/1.0
robots.txt Control
Add "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: Googlebot-Image" in robots.txt to block image indexing while keeping regular crawling.
Block
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
Allow (default)
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Allow: /
Official Documentation
Test your robots.txt against Googlebot-Image
Check which paths are blocked or allowed for each user-agent