---
title: "403 status code when impersonating Googlebot indexing your website"
date: "2022-03-01T00:19:57+00:00"
summary:
image:
type: "article"
url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/help/93311-403-status-code-when-impersonating-googlebot-indexing-your-website"
id: "1393ca6a-cf9c-4c73-828e-8038c6e5d3ec"
---

While indexing your website as Googlebot (choosing the User-Agent - Googlebot from the SEO tool), the result status code is 403 (permission denied).

This might be due to the fact that you are using a WAF (such as Cloudflare) that can identify that this was a fake Googlebot and not the real Google service.

In you want further details on the way Google verify their bots you can check the following article: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot?hl=en&visit\_id=637816908286123780-2366646208&rd=1](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot?hl=en&visit_id=637816908286123780-2366646208&rd=1)