Why this matters
Your webpage may work normally for users but fail for certain bots. This can lead to issues like “Destination Not Working” in Google Ads.
By overriding the user-agent in Chrome DevTools, you can test how your site behaves for different crawlers.
Steps (as per Google’s official documentation)
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/16431325
- Open your website in Chrome
- Right-click and select Inspect
- Open the Network Conditions tab
- Uncheck “Use browser default”
- Choose or enter a custom user-agent
- Reload the page
Example: Testing Google Ads bot
You can set the user-agent to:
AdsBot-GoogleAdsBot-Google-Mobile
This helps you verify whether your page is accessible and working correctly for Google Ads crawlers.
Reference: Google user-agents
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/overview-google-crawlers
Summary
Use Chrome DevTools to override the user-agent and quickly check if your webpage is accessible to bots like AdsBot-Google. This is useful for diagnosing ad disapproval issues related to page accessibility.