Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel has stated that in early January 2023, the brand new BingBot will probably be chargeable for 100% of Bing’s crawling exercise. The brand new person agent is now chargeable 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 person agent identify change, for BingBot.
January 2023. Subsequent month, within the coming weeks, the brand new BingBot person agent will probably be chargeable for 100% of all crawling from Bing. Fabrice Canel wrote, “will go to 100% early January” for BingBot’s new identify. He added they’re nonetheless at 50% now as a result of they wished to be additional protected.
Previous user-agent. Microsoft stated it could cease utilizing its historic person agent by the Fall of 2022. That user-agent appears to be like like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (appropriate; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
New user-agent. Bing will use a user-agent that identifies the particular model of Microsoft Edge is crawling your web site. Right here is the format for each desktop and cellular:
Desktop – Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; appropriate; 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 (appropriate; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
“W.X.Y.Z” will probably be substituted with the most recent 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 modification because it was introduced again in 2019. However in any occasion, this modification can affect your web site in case you have any person agent detection strategies for BingBot. Make certain to check your web site to see if it helps the brand new person agent. Most websites most likely don’t want to fret about this, however in case you have finished 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 primarily based internet consulting agency. He additionally runs Search Engine Roundtable, a well-liked search weblog on very superior SEM matters. Barry may be adopted on Twitter right here.
