Google's Googlebot Claims to Come From California, but Actually Crawls From Multiple Locations
TLDR
Google's Googlebot declares itself as coming from Mountain View, California, but actually crawls from various data centers worldwide depending on regional needs.
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Optimixed's original report on this story.
SERoundtable reports that while Googlebot consistently identifies itself as originating from California, the actual egress points vary across Google's global data centers. Per Google's Gary Illyes on Bluesky, IP location declarations are separate from physical egress points—an IP assigned to a cluster in Atlanta, for example, will exit from Atlanta regardless of its declared location. The distinction matters for SEOs relying on geo-blocking or traffic analysis, since blocking US traffic would disrupt Google's crawling even if the bot claims a California origin.