Playbook: hunt fake Googlebot in your logs

Playbook: hunt fake Googlebot in your logs
A repeatable scrub, credited to the people who published the methods.
→ DeviceAtlas / Distil-era write-ups — fake bots cluster on odd ASNs, never Google's. Takeaway: join bot IPs to ASN data; anything not AS15169 claiming to be Googlebot is lying.
→ Google's rDNS verification doc — the ground-truth check. Takeaway: run it only on IPs that fail the IP-range match, to save lookups.
★ Pick of the week — Patrick Stox's fake-bot teardown — fake Googlebots often ignore robots.txt and hammer one path. Takeaway: cross-reference UA=Googlebot against robots-disallowed paths; real Googlebot obeys them.
→ AbuseIPDB — confirm a suspicious IP's reputation. Takeaway: a final sanity check before you block a range.
Verify before you block — a wrong block on the real Googlebot is far costlier than a few scraper hits.