Googlebot Simulator
See a page as Googlebot, Bingbot or GPTBot and as a visitor, side by side: status, redirects, title, canonical, noindex and text, to catch cloaking.
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About the Googlebot Simulator
The Googlebot Simulator shows a page the way a search bot gets it and the way a visitor gets it, side by side. Our server requests the URL twice from the same address: once with a browser user agent and once as Googlebot, Bingbot or GPTBot. It then compares the status code, redirects, title, meta description, canonical, robots directives, H1, amount of text, links and structured data. Differences reveal cloaking, firewalls that block bots, bot-only redirects and links injected by hacked plugins.
Our server requests the URLs you enter, like a crawler: it reads the response without running the page's scripts, and the analysis runs in your browser. The URLs and results are not stored. Bot requests carry the bot's user agent but come from our server's address, not the bot's.
How to use the Googlebot Simulator
- Enter the page address and pick the bot to view it as (Googlebot is the default).
- Choose the visitor to compare with: desktop Chrome or an iPhone.
- Press Compare views and read the verdict, then the side-by-side table for each difference.
- Open the redirect chains and text excerpts under the table to see exactly what each one received.
Works well with the Googlebot Simulator
- Robots.txt Checker: check that robots.txt lets the bot in too.
- AI Crawler Checker: see which AI crawlers are blocked.
- Website SEO Checker: audit the page itself.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the same as "Fetch as Google"?
No. Google's own tool is URL Inspection in Search Console, which fetches from Google's servers and renders JavaScript. This simulator sends Googlebot's user agent from our server, so it shows what your server and firewall return to anything that claims to be Googlebot. That is exactly what cloaking scripts and bot rules react to.
Why is Googlebot blocked here but my pages are indexed?
Good bot protection checks the IP address: a request that says "Googlebot" but does not come from Google is a fake, and blocking it is correct. If the real Googlebot can crawl (URL Inspection shows the page), there is nothing to fix.
What counts as cloaking?
Showing search engines different content from what people see, to manipulate rankings: other text, hidden links, a different title or a redirect only bots get. Adapting the layout for phones, or showing a cookie banner, is not cloaking as long as the main content is the same.
Does it run JavaScript?
No. Both versions are the raw HTML before rendering. If your content is built by JavaScript, both sides may show little text; that is a rendering question, not cloaking.
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