Today I got about 10 hits from 74.125.214.44 and 74.125.212.x requesting the same 2 pdf files on my site. I'm not sure what the attraction is, but the file names have words that include acquisition and analysis. Out of a few hundred other PDF files they could have asked for. The ususal google-bot at 66.249.66.x asks for all my PDF files regularly.

Today's hits have google-proxy-(IP).google.com host names.

Why they requested the same 2 files at least 5 or 6 times each, over a 2.5 hour time-frame, I don't know.

I've had a grand total of 302 page-requests from 74.125.0.0/16 with a few starting in Q1-2021 but most happening since June 2021. None before.

Almost all the hits I get from this /16, including today's hits, come from 74.125.X.Y where X ranges from 210 to 218.

Some of these requests are for /.well-known/traffic-advice and the secret google-alpha-coded-pages that prove you are the owner / operator of your website. I find that I get those hits out-of-the-blue for no reason I know of.

In general for the hits from 74.125/16 I see a lot of strange UA's and a few strange referrers - like //ghost-rider/

For these hits today, the user-agent was this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 Google-PageRenderer Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/)

What I'm curious about is - is this google activity or some unknown 3'rd party hitting me through this rather concentrated / dedicated IP range?