This Googlebot simulator fetches a page with Googlebot Smartphone's user agent and shows what comes back: the status code and redirects, whether robots.txt allows it, any noindex, and the title, H1, headings, links and word count in the HTML. Paste a URL and press Check. No signup.
How to use the googlebot simulator
- 1Paste the page's URL, such as example.com/page.
- 2Press Check, or hit Enter.
- 3Read the findings at the top first. A blocked robots.txt rule, a noindex or an error status is listed there with what it means.
- 4Then read What Googlebot gets, row by row. Words in the HTML tells you how much text is there before JavaScript runs.
When to use it
- A page isn't showing on Google and you want to rule out the usual blockers.
- You shipped a site built with JavaScript and want to see how much text is in the raw HTML.
- You changed robots.txt or a noindex setting and want to check the live page.
- A plugin or a firewall might be treating bots differently from visitors.
Worked examples
A redirect, then a clean page
We checked our own homepage on its old http address.
- URL to check
- http://searchblueprint.io
- HTTP status
- 200
- Redirects
- 308 http://searchblueprint.io/ > 200 https://searchblueprint.io/
- robots.txt
- Allowed (Allow: /)
- Indexable
- Yes
- Words in the HTML
- 4,644
One permanent redirect from http to https, then a 200. robots.txt allows it, there's no noindex, and the text is in the HTML, so Google doesn't have to wait for JavaScript to read it.
A page with almost no text
We checked a placeholder domain.
- URL to check
- example.com
- HTTP status
- 200
- H1
- None
- Words in the HTML
- 27
Here it's simply a short page. On a real site, a count this low while the page looks full in a browser means the text arrives by JavaScript. Google renders it in a later step; most other crawlers, AI bots included, never see it.
What it can and can't tell you
It sends Googlebot's user agent, but from our server, not from Google's addresses. Google tells site owners to check a visitor's IP with a reverse DNS lookup before trusting that it's Googlebot, and some firewalls do exactly that. So if this tool gets a 403 and your page is fine in Search Console, the firewall caught us, not Google.
It reads the HTML before JavaScript runs. Google crawls, then renders JavaScript in a later step, and says it isn't obvious when a page is waiting for either. For Google's own view of a page after rendering, use URL Inspection in Search Console, which shows a screenshot of what Google's tool saw.
What Googlebot does, from Google's own documentation
- Reads robots.txt first, and skips any URL it disallows.
- Follows up to 10 redirect hops.
- Reads the first 2MB of an HTML file, and sends only that part on for indexing.
- Drops a page from results when it finds noindex, in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header.
- Crawls mostly with its smartphone user agent, since Google indexes the mobile version of most sites.
Made by SearchBlueprint
This Googlebot simulator is free with no signup. SearchBlueprint, who make it, sell SEO planning: a plan that shows the searches your customers type and which page on your site should answer each one.
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