GoogleImageProxy

What is GoogleImageProxy?

About

GoogleImageProxy fetches and caches images and link previews for Gmail email rendering, enabling safe display of external content within Google's email interface. You can see how often GoogleImageProxy visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.

Type

Fetcher
Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By Google
Last Updated 17 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0%
0% of top websites are blocking GoogleImageProxy
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
GoogleImageProxy normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

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Robots.txt

Should I Block GoogleImageProxy?

Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.

How Do I Block GoogleImageProxy?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.

You can block GoogleImageProxy or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)
# robots.txt
# This should block GoogleImageProxy

User-agent: GoogleImageProxy
Disallow: /