Google quietly corrected a big misunderstanding about its News crawler.
Googlebot-News was mistakenly said to influence the Google News tab in Search…
Publisher crawl preferences via Googlebot-News do NOT affect the News tab in Google Search.
Old version said: “...affect the News tab in Google Search…” This line was removed by Google.
If you're an SEO or publisher, your robots.txt rules only affect Google News surfaces, not the Search News tab!
Google’s small docs update = big SEO implications! Always double-check what crawler rules actually affect.