Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel has mentioned that in early January 2023, the brand new BingBot can be accountable for 100% of Bing’s crawling exercise. The brand new consumer agent is now accountable 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 can be accountable 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 needed to be further protected.
Previous user-agent. Microsoft mentioned it could 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 particular model of Microsoft Edge is crawling your website. Right here is the format for each desktop and cellular:
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
Cellular – Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Construct/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Cellular Safari/537.36 (suitable; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
“W.X.Y.Z” can be substituted with the newest Microsoft Edge model Bing is utilizing, for eg. “100.0.4896.127″.
Why we care. You in all probability ought to have been ready for this alteration because it was introduced again in 2019. However in any occasion, this alteration can affect your website when you’ve got any consumer agent detection strategies for BingBot. Be sure to check your website to see if it helps the brand new consumer agent. Most websites in all probability don’t want to fret about this, however when you’ve got accomplished any superior bot detection, you might have to take steps to replace these scripts.
New on Search Engine Land
Concerning the creator
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming staff for SMX occasions. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based mostly 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.
