Misquoted Confidence: high
Primary source found, but the way it is quoted changes the subject, metric, population or precision.
Safe rephrasing
Google does not support the crawl-delay field in robots.txt; Googlebot ignores it, though some other crawlers honor it.
What the source says
Google supports the following fields (other fields such as crawl-delay aren't supported): user-agent : identifies which crawler the rules apply to.
Google Search Central — How Google interprets the robots.txt specification
- Commonly cited as
- "Set Crawl-delay: 10 to reduce Google crawling"
- True origin
- Google Search Central — How Google interprets the robots.txt specification
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- Current documentation
- Data as of
- Documentation read on 2026-10-17
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- Official Google documentation (current version read Oct. 17, 2026).
- Drift between quote and source
- Type: a rule some other crawlers honor presented as working for Google; Googlebot ignores it
- Interest
- Google operates Google Search and documents its own systems.