Generic rules in "robots.txt" not picked up by Googlebot

If I understod right the answer is not that easy. If a single user has send a link using Gmail, googlebot doesn’t honor robots.txt. Same thing if a link is shared to somewhere (backlinks) where it looks to googlebot as normal everyday link.

Again — robots.txt is just a request.

There is another but more… Quite many bots identify themselves as googlebot and the reality can be found only via IP.