Is this really Googlebot?
Paste an address from your logs and the User-Agent it sent. This checks the claim against the address list Google publishes, and tells you whether the request really came from them.
Googlebot is the most forged crawler on the web, because most sites allow it unconditionally. A scraper that claims to be Googlebot is asking for the access you granted Google.
No account, and nothing is stored against you. We look the address up, we do not log who asked.
What the three answers mean
Verified
The address is inside the list Google publishes for Googlebot, or it reverse resolves into their own zone and that hostname resolves back to the same address. This is a positive result, not an absence of evidence.
Forged
Google publishes the complete list of addresses Googlebot crawls from, and this address is not in it. Something sent you the name without the infrastructure behind it.
Cannot tell
We hold no authoritative answer for this one, so we say so rather than guessing. A missing reverse DNS record is suspicious and it is not proof, and a checker that turns "I do not know" into "forged" is worse than useless: it is confidently wrong.
How Google says to verify Googlebot
Google publishes the full list of addresses Googlebot crawls from, and also supports reverse DNS with forward confirmation into googlebot.com.
We refresh our copy of that list every twelve hours. If ours goes stale, this tool returns "cannot tell" and says so, rather than condemning a crawler that added addresses since we last looked. Read the source: Google's documentation.
Questions
How do I know if Googlebot is real?
Check the address against the list Google publishes, or do a reverse DNS lookup and confirm the hostname resolves back to the same address. A hostname ending in googlebot.com or google.com that forward confirms is genuine. The user agent string proves nothing on its own: anyone can send it, and most scrapers do.
Why would someone pretend to be Googlebot?
Because it works. Most sites allow Googlebot through rate limits, paywalls and bot rules without question, since blocking it costs search rankings. Claiming the identity inherits that access, which makes it the cheapest way for a scraper to get treated as a welcome guest.
Does a Googlebot user agent from a datacenter mean it is fake?
It is a strong signal but not proof by itself, which is why this checker compares the address against the list Google publishes rather than guessing from the network. Google crawls from its own address space, so a Googlebot claim from an unrelated hosting provider is almost always forged.
One address is not the question
You came here with a log line. If something is forging Googlebot against your site, it is not doing it once, and checking them one at a time is not a plan. WebDecoy watches every request that claims a crawler identity, verifies each one the way this page just did, and links the ones that come back to the same actor even when the addresses keep changing.
See what is claiming to be a crawler on your site