Google has made an update to its Google-Extended section of the Google crawler (user agent) search documentation to change the references of “Bard” to “Gemini” because of the product name change. Google also clarified that Google Extended has no impact or effect on Google Search.
Google added this new line that reads, “Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion or ranking in Google Search.”
As a reminder, Google-Extended is a standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Gemini Apps (formerly Bard) and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products.”
Google-Extended doesn’t have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent strings; the robots.txt user-agent token is used in a control capacity.
Google-Extended also does not work for controlling what Google SGE shows or not.
Google explained that this document was changed because “With the name change of Bard to Gemini Apps, we clarified that Gemini Apps is affected by Google-Extended, and, based on publisher feedback, we specified that Google-Extended doesn’t affect Google Search.”
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