Google Tag Manager (GTM) is designed to facilitate the deployment of tags, including those for Google Analytics and other marketing services. However, the firing of GTM tags depends on how they are configured, particularly the triggers set for them.

Googlebot, which is used by Google to crawl and index web pages, is generally not considered an actual visitor in the same way a human user is. Therefore, by default, it does not execute JavaScript on the pages it crawls to avoid excessive server load and misinterpretation of page content; this would include GTM tags as well.

However, Googlebot occasionally renders pages using a web rendering service, which can execute JavaScript to help understand pages that rely on dynamic content. In these cases, it might interact with GTM-related scripts. Keep in mind, though, that even if Googlebot executes your GTM code, it typically doesn’t impact your analytics data. This is because well-defined filters should exclude bot traffic from your analytics reports.

To ensure that GTM does not fire for Googlebot or other crawlers, it’s prudent to implement filters within GTM or Google Analytics that prevent data collection from known bots and spiders. You can do this by maintaining a list of user agents that should be ignored or by using Google’s predefined bot filters.