Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from Google Search
Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from Google Search: they are two separate crawlers. The fear of losing traffic, which keeps many executives from refusing to let Google's artificial intelligence products use their content, has no basis.
Google documents two agents with separate functions. Googlebot crawls your site for Search. Google-Extended covers the training of the Gemini models and the grounding of their answers in the Gemini apps and on Vertex AI.
Few businesses use this distinction, yet it gives them fine-grained control. You can refuse to let your content feed Google's artificial intelligence products while keeping your presence in Search fully intact. That decision costs you not a single visitor of your organic traffic, that is, the visits that arrive through search results, without paid advertising.
We do not recommend blocking. We are correcting a misunderstanding that keeps management teams from settling a question that belongs to their values rather than to their acquisition budget. Once the fear is lifted, the decision takes five minutes.
That clarity has commercial value. An executive who has hesitated for two years on this question is leaving the decision to a file written by a former vendor, often copied from a template found online. The cost of that indecision is not zero: it is measured in visibility lost in the answers their clients consult.
What not to confuse
Google-Extended does not control your presence in the generated summaries that appear in search results. Those summaries come from the usual mechanisms of Search, not from this agent. A business that blocks Google-Extended believing it is withdrawing from generated answers is pulling the wrong lever.
Watch out as well for templates copied online for the robots file, the text file where your site tells crawlers what they may read. Several of them simultaneously block training crawlers and citation crawlers. The first feed artificial intelligence models, the second read your pages to cite them in an answer. The business is removed from the answers of several assistants without anyone having decided it.
Two things to do
- Check what your robots file blocks today, line by line, and who wrote it.
- Decide on training according to your values, knowing that the cost to your search traffic is zero.
Running this check and deciding family by family is part of what we cover in a paid audit.
Crawler names change several times a year. Always check the documentation of the vendor involved before making any change, never a summary article.
This point sits inside the framework described in who measures what, and who measures nothing.
The full framework, with the three families of crawlers and what each one costs you, is in our article on AI crawlers.
- Google, Google's common crawlers, official documentation, accessed July 2026.
Geneviève puts the strategy for your engagement into action. She leads all our web development projects: Shopify, WordPress and the new ways of building a site with AI. She manages our team of developers and translates your business needs into technical language. She runs your organic search (SEO), your visibility in AI answers (GEO) and your site's conversion rate optimization (CRO). Her work is at the heart of three goals: Attract customers with SEO and AI, Improve your site's conversion, and Strengthen your visibility in AI answers. With Gabriel, she also builds the landing pages for your advertising campaigns. She writes mainly about SEO, AI visibility and web design.
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