Google Messages Crawler Explained: What the Google Messages User-Agent Means for SEO, Analytics, and Modern Link Previews
The way people share content has changed. Not long ago, sharing a link meant copying a URL and pasting it into an email or social platform. Today, links are shared constantly inside private conversations—WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and increasingly, Google Messages . When someone pastes a URL into a chat, something interesting happens behind the scenes. The messaging app reaches out to the website, fetches information, and generates a preview with a title, description, and image. This process does not happen magically. It happens because a crawler visits your site. Recently, Google quietly introduced a new user-agent dedicated to this exact function: Google Messages For many digital marketing experts , website owners, SEOs, and developers, this new bot raises questions: Why is Google Messages crawling my site? Is this related to Google Search rankings? Should I allow or block it? How does it affect analytics and server logs? This article breaks everything down in simpl...