Google 2025 is not the Google you remember and respect.
"GoogleAssociationService bot was kind enough to ask 1,000,000+ times yesterday for the same file from 4000+ Google IP addresses. Answer was the same 404 - File Not Found. The User-Agent does not provide a support link unlike their other bots." -- https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/114205536438977922
Google absolutely does run "misbehaving bots", and has all the world renowned user support it's well know for from the teams running them, which means your best - perhaps only- option is to firewall off all Google ASNs.
With Google search's decline in usefulness and it's plummeting referral traffic, combined with their unashamed AI-grifting copyright infringement and IP theft, the tradeoff in the old thinking of "I need to let Google crawl my site because I still naively believe SEO will make my business successful" is rapidly moving towards "Fuck you Google, you don't get anything I publish for free anymore."
Thanks for the link. Apparently Google has more bots than I thought. But is that really a Google bot or is someone else using their name? I don't see 'GoogleAssociationService' listed in their documentation [1].
They do say it’s from Google IP addresses, but it might be someone running a bot in Google Cloud? Maybe they checked that, but we can’t tell from a tweet.
Seems like a reasonable approach might be to whitelist the documented Google bots and block others.