Google-Read-Aloud
recommended: observeGoogle-Read-Aloud fetches web content to provide text-to-speech functionality, enabling users to have web pages read aloud through Google's accessibility services.
What it does
Google-Read-Aloud usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
How to identify it
User-agent contains any of:
Google-Read-Aloud
Example user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers)
robots.txt
Well-behaved crawlers honor robots.txt. To control Google-Read-Aloud:
Allow full access
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud
Allow: /
Block entirely
User-agent: Google-Read-Aloud
Disallow: /
Grey-area scrapers ignore robots.txt. Botscope enforces your policy at the edge or origin regardless —
see how →
See Google-Read-Aloud on your own site
Botscope shows every bot and AI agent hitting your site — and lets you allow, challenge, or block each one. Observe first, enforce when you're ready.
Start free — connect in minutes