Google has introduced a new user-agent called "Google-Agent," designed for users to navigate the web and perform actions upon request. This is a strong indication of the empowerment of autonomous agents within the Google ecosystem.

Key Points:

  • Google has added a new user-agent named "Google-Agent," which falls into the category of "user-triggered fetchers."
  • This is used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions at the request of users.
  • Project Mariner is mentioned as a concrete use case.
  • Google is also testing the web-bot-auth protocol with the identity https://agent.bot.goog.

As of March 23, 2026, Google officially announced the arrival of a new user-agent: Google-Agent. This joins the list of "user-triggered fetchers," which are robots triggered not by the search engine but directly by a user action.

Specifically, when you request a Google agent to perform a task on the web, this user-agent introduces itself to the servers of the visited sites. Google states that the rollout will occur gradually over the next few weeks.

A User-Agent Associated with Google’s IA Agents

The Google-Agent user-agent is directly associated with agents hosted on Google infrastructure. These agents have the ability to navigate web pages and perform actions like a human user, but they do so automatically.

Google showcases Project Mariner as a use case. To remind, Project Mariner is Google’s IA agent that can control a browser to perform tasks on behalf of the user: filling out forms, searching, interacting with web interfaces, etc.

Technically, the Google-Agent uses IP ranges referenced in the user-triggered-agents.json file, allowing site administrators and developers to identify and filter these requests when necessary.

Web-bot-auth Protocol Emerges

Along with this new user-agent, Google indicates that it is testing a new standard designed to authenticate bots on the web called web-bot-auth. Google is using the identity https://agent.bot.goog for this.

This protocol aims to provide greater transparency in interactions between automated agents and websites: instead of a simple user-agent that anyone can mimic, web-bot-auth will allow verification of whether a bot is indeed what it claims to be. This is an important issue for publishers who want to control access to their content as the number of IA agents increases.