Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel has mentioned that in early January 2023, the brand new BingBot shall be liable for 100% of Bing’s crawling exercise. The brand new consumer agent is now liable for about 50% of all crawls.
Some historical past. In 2019, Microsoft Bing introduced new Bingbot user-agent names that match higher with its evergreen Bingbot crawling and rendering service. Then in April 2022, Microsoft introduced a reputation change, a consumer agent title change, for BingBot.
January 2023. Subsequent month, within the coming weeks, the brand new BingBot consumer agent shall be liable for 100% of all crawling from Bing. Fabrice Canel wrote, “will go to 100% early January” for BingBot’s new title. He added they’re nonetheless at 50% now as a result of they wished to be additional secure.
Previous user-agent. Microsoft mentioned it might cease utilizing its historic consumer agent by the Fall of 2022. That user-agent seems to be like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (suitable; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
New user-agent. Bing will use a user-agent that identifies the precise model of Microsoft Edge is crawling your web site. Right here is the format for each desktop and cell:
Desktop – Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; suitable; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Cell – Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Construct/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Cell Safari/537.36 (suitable; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
“W.X.Y.Z” shall be substituted with the newest Microsoft Edge model Bing is utilizing, for eg. “100.0.4896.127″.
Why we care. You most likely ought to have been ready for this alteration because it was introduced again in 2019. However in any occasion, this alteration can affect your web site when you’ve got any consumer agent detection strategies for BingBot. Ensure that to check your web site to see if it helps the brand new consumer agent. Most websites most likely don’t want to fret about this, however when you’ve got performed any superior bot detection, you could must take steps to replace these scripts.
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Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming workforce for SMX occasions. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based mostly net consulting agency. He additionally runs Search Engine Roundtable, a well-liked search weblog on very superior SEM matters. Barry will be adopted on Twitter right here.
