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I do and I can confirm there are no requests (except for robots.txt and the odd /favicon.ico). Google sorta respects robots.txt. They do have a weird gotcha though: they still put the URLs in search, they just appear with an useless description. Their suggestion to avoid that can be summarized as: don’t block us, let us crawl and just tell us not to use the result, just trust us! when they could very easily change that behavior to make more sense. Not a single damn person with Google blocked in robots.txt wants to be indexed, and their logic on password protecting kind of makes sense but my concern isn’t security, it’s that I don’t like them (or Bing or Yandex).
Another gotcha I’ve seen linked is that their ad targeting bot for Google AdSense (different crawler) doesn’t respect a * exclusion, but that kind of makes sense since it will only ever visit your site if you place AdSense ads on it.
And I suppose they’ll train Bard on all data they scraped because of course. Probably no way to opt out of that without opting out of Google Search as well.
Very early on, at least, their spiders respected robots.txt.
I know there are folks that have all of the Big G in their robots.txt files on principle, might want to ask them if it works or not.
I do and I can confirm there are no requests (except for robots.txt and the odd /favicon.ico). Google sorta respects robots.txt. They do have a weird gotcha though: they still put the URLs in search, they just appear with an useless description. Their suggestion to avoid that can be summarized as: don’t block us, let us crawl and just tell us not to use the result, just trust us! when they could very easily change that behavior to make more sense. Not a single damn person with Google blocked in robots.txt wants to be indexed, and their logic on password protecting kind of makes sense but my concern isn’t security, it’s that I don’t like them (or Bing or Yandex).
Another gotcha I’ve seen linked is that their ad targeting bot for Google AdSense (different crawler) doesn’t respect a
*exclusion, but that kind of makes sense since it will only ever visit your site if you place AdSense ads on it.And I suppose they’ll train Bard on all data they scraped because of course. Probably no way to opt out of that without opting out of Google Search as well.
Now that’s a dirty trick.