What Is Google-Extended and Why It Matters for Your Website (April 2025 Update)

If you manage a website, work in SEO, or are a developer dealing with content, you may have seen something called Google-Extended in recent updates from Google.

In April 2025, Google made some changes to how they explain this tool. In this blog, we’ll go over what Google-Extended is, why it’s important, how to use it, and what the latest update means — all in simple language.

What Is Google-Extended?

Google-Extended is a special rule you can add to your robots.txt file (the file that tells search engines what they can or can’t do on your site).

But here’s the key part:
It’s not about Google Search or your rankings.

Instead, it tells Google whether or not they’re allowed to use your website’s content to train their AI models, like the Gemini models used in:

• Gemini AI apps (Google’s version of ChatGPT)
• Vertex AI (Google’s platform for developers)
• Tools that use Google Search to “ground” AI answers (helping them be more accurate)

So basically, this rule gives you control over whether your content helps power Google’s future AI tools.

Does Google-Extended Crawl My Website?

No, and this is important:

Google-Extended is not a crawler.
It doesn’t visit your site or collect pages. It doesn’t show up in your server logs.

Google still crawls your site using regular crawlers like:

• Googlebot (for general web search)
• Googlebot-News (for news content)
• Googlebot-Image (for images)

But after your content is crawled, Google-Extended controls whether that content is used to train AI models.

How to Use Google-Extended in Your robots.txt

Let’s say you want to stop Google from using most of your content in AI training, but allow one specific page. Your robots.txt might look like this:

user-agent: Google-Extended
allow: /archive/1Q84
disallow: /archive/

This means:

• The page /archive/1Q84 can be used in AI training
• Everything else under /archive/ is blocked from AI training

Again — this does not block Google from showing these pages in search results. It only affects whether the content is used for training future AI models.

What Changed in April 2025?

Google made two key updates:

1. Clearer Description for Google-Extended

They updated the wording to make it more obvious that:

• Google-Extended is about AI training
• It doesn’t affect your search rankings
• It doesn’t have its own crawler
• It’s just a signal inside your robots.txt file

This helps avoid confusion — especially for developers and SEOs who are managing search visibility.

2. Fix for Googlebot-News

Previously, Google’s docs said that rules for Googlebot-News could affect whether your content appeared in the Google News tab. That was incorrect.

The fix now says:

Robots.txt rules for Googlebot-News do not control what shows up in the News tab.

This is important for news publishers — just blocking or allowing Googlebot-News won’t change your visibility in Google News.

Why This Matters

Here’s why you should care:

• For publishers: If you don’t want Google using your articles or content to train AI models, Google-Extended lets you opt out.
• For developers: You now have more precise control over how your content is used beyond traditional web search.
• For SEOs: It’s important to know that this tool does not impact indexing or ranking. It’s purely about AI training.

What You Should Do

• If you’re okay with Google using your content for AI training → you don’t need to do anything.
• If you want to block that use → update your robots.txt with rules for Google-Extended.
• Don’t worry about search rankings — this won’t hurt your SEO.
• If you’re in news SEO, remember that Googlebot-News settings don’t control the News tab.

If you want help writing a custom robots.txt file or aren’t sure how this affects your site, feel free to reach out or leave a comment.

Keeping control of how your content is used — especially in the age of AI — is more important than ever. Google-Extended is one way to do just that.