Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Crawler
Google's crawler for shopping pages, which checks product pages, prices and checkout for Google Shopping.
Glossary · Storebot-Google
Google Shopping's own crawler. It crawls more often than Googlebot, goes through product, cart and checkout pages to verify merchant data, and robots.txt rules for it affect all Google Shopping surfaces.
Documented in
Google's Merchant Center help says the StoreBot crawler goes through product detail, cart and checkout pages, can fill in checkout forms, and records price, shipping, availability, coupons and payment methods to verify the data merchants share in Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center Help · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google's crawler list says robots.txt rules addressed to the Storebot-Google user agent affect all surfaces of Google Shopping, such as the Shopping tab in Google Search.
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google Shopping uses its own crawler, Storebot (Storebot-Google), instead of Googlebot because it needs fresh product information, prices, availability and shipping details and therefore crawls much more often.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Storebot-Google is used to validate merchant feeds: when a feed gives a price, Google double-checks it on the merchant's site.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Storebot-Google also does deep crawls, for example of checkout pages, which do not belong in the search index; this is another reason it is kept separate from Googlebot.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Treat Storebot-Google separately from Googlebot in robots.txt and bot protection: a shop that blocks it on product, cart or checkout paths can undermine Shopping price and availability checks, even when Googlebot is allowed.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Kit items about Storebot-Google: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Let Storebot-Google crawl product, cart and checkout pages, through robots.txt and bot protection
Rests on 6 claims, 6 of them naming Storebot-Google; its own words name Storebot-Google
Also inglossary term Storebot-Google
Google Shopping uses its own crawler, Storebot (Storebot-Google), instead of Googlebot because it needs fresh product information, prices, availability and shipping details and therefore crawls much more often.
Google's crawler list says robots.txt rules addressed to the Storebot-Google user agent affect all surfaces of Google Shopping, such as the Shopping tab in Google Search.
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.