Indeed, years ago I had scripts to automatically fetch URLs from IRC and I quickly realized that if I didn't spoof the user agent of a proper web browser many websites would reject the query. Googlebot's UA worked just fine however.
They obviously don't care enough then - Google says you should use rdns to verify that googlebot crawls are real[0]. Cloudflare does this automatically now as well for customers with WAF (pro plan).
simias|5 years ago
judge2020|5 years ago
They obviously don't care enough then - Google says you should use rdns to verify that googlebot crawls are real[0]. Cloudflare does this automatically now as well for customers with WAF (pro plan).
0: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...