Most Googlebots are fake

I recently saw complaints about Google’s search engine crawler taking down websites by sending them too much traffic:We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI training also. It's honestly kind of frustrating also because you then search on it and theres (was) nothing on how you are meant to "correctly" tell google to fuck off, and not use it like that. — User jofzar on Hacker NewsGoogle's web scraping functionality has been acting as a ddos for more than two decades. I've seen literally hundreds of reports of them attacking websites and taking them down, where there's nothing you can do but accept the traffic, or get delisted— User 20k on Hacker NewsBut I think these complaints are misguided. This traffic doesn’t come from Google at all. It comes from other people’s bots impersonating Googlebot’s name for misleading and arguably-abusive purposes. Most* Googlebots are fake. The user agent…