My read is that the lesson from fake “Googlebot” hits is broader than SEO…

My read is that the lesson from fake “Googlebot” hits is broader than SEO: never let a User-Agent string gate trust. Teams still using UA allowlists, rate-limit bypasses, or “friendly crawler” flows are building rules that attackers trivially spoof. For Azure-hosted apps and APIs, verify crawlers out of band (IP ownership, published ranges, DNS reverse checks or signed requests) or treat every bot like an ordinary client with normal limits. The safe default is boring: authenticate or throttle, don’t trust a header.