Google Digital Asset Links
Google Digital Asset Links is an SEO crawler operated by Google. It maps link graphs, ranking signals, and on-page audits, usually for a SaaS product that helps marketers monitor their own or competitor sites.
Volume can be heavy. SEO crawlers often request every page on a site, and several can hit you in parallel if multiple customers are auditing your domain at once.
Most are well-behaved, respect robots.txt, and back off when rate-limited. The trade-off for allowing them is being visible inside the marketing tools your customers and competitors use.
See Google Digital Asset Links on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Verify by IP
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Heavy on demand
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
Google runs 103 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
25- Google Feed Fetcher
- Google Image Proxy
- Google Publisher Center
- Google Web Preview
- Google-AdWords-Express
- Google-PageRenderer
- Google-Read-Aloud
- GoogleDocs
- GoogleImageProxy
- GoogleProducer
- Gmail Image Proxy
- Google Calendar Importer
- Google Page Renderer
- Google Web Snippet
- Google API
- Google Cloud Scheduler
- Google-Document-Conversion
- Google Sheets
- Google Slides
- Google Docs
- Google Area 120 Privacy Policy Fetcher
- Chrome Privacy Preserving Prefetch Proxy
- Google Cloud Function
- GoogleApps-DocumentScanner
- GoogleStackdriverMonitoring
Search Engine
14DevOps & Monitoring
13- Chrome-Lighthouse
- Google Inspection Tool
- Google Schema Markup Testing Tool
- Google Trust Services (DCV Check)
- Google-Structured-Data-Testing-Tool
- GoogleAssociationService
- ProjectShield Url Check
- Google Read Aloud
- Google Search Console
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Google Partner Monitoring
- Google Structured Data Testing Tool
- Google Stackdriver Monitoring
Ads Network Bot
11Training Crawler
9Agentic Browser
8Security Scanner
7SEO Crawler
4- Google Digital Asset LinksYou are here
- Google StoreBot
- Google-Site-Verification
- Google-Structured-Data-Testing
Brand Intelligence
3Shopping Bot
3Live-Fetch AI
2Ad Verification
2AI Coding Tool
1Agentic Commerce
1Should I let Google Digital Asset Links through?
In most cases, yes. Useful to be visible in SEO tooling, but volume can be heavy. Rate-limit to keep the load manageable. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Google Digital Asset Links affect my Google rankings?
No. Google Digital Asset Links is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from Google Digital Asset Links?
Two checks. The User-Agent header should match a known Google Digital Asset Links string, and the request's source IP should fall inside Google's published ranges. The User-Agent alone is trivially spoofable, so the IP check is what gives you confidence. Google publishes the ranges so you can validate at the CDN or edge.
Why is a third-party tool crawling my site?
Someone, possibly a competitor running a backlink audit, possibly your own team, set up a job in Google. The crawler runs on their schedule. Blocking it only blocks their visibility into your site, it doesn't break anything user-facing.
How is Google Digital Asset Links different from Google's other bots?
Google splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Google family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Google Digital Asset Links?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.