Gary Illyes from Google posted a couple of tweets on Twitter about Google’s use of Googlebots, and particularly other parts of Google that may also use Googlebots for their own programs.

For example, AdWords uses their own Adsbot.  And it make sense that other areas of Google use Googlebot technology for their own purposes rather than each team writing their own version of Googlebot to do the same thing.

He also posted a follow up about these other non-search Googlebots.

So don’t plan on using another Google service that has their own version of Googlebot, such as AdWords with their Adsbot, and expect it will have any impact on what the search Googlebot does on your site or what/how Google indexes the site organically.  So only the Search Googlebot will affect web search.

The various Googlebots also have their own individual useragents, so you know which Googlebot might be crawling your site.

This isn’t really news to most SEOs, but it periodically comes up when another non-Search team at Google is using their own Googlebots for something, and SEOs begin to speculate how it could have an impact on SEO and search in Google.