new Bingbot user agent is now fully online
Fabrice Canel, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, confirmed that the new Bingbot agent is 100% available today. The new Bingbot can be used to crawl 100% of sites – unless there is an issue and Bing must revert to the old Bingbot user agent.
Bing’s confirmation. Fabrice Canel tweeted, “yes. 100% today.” When necessary, we will revert to the previous user agents.”
He linked to the Bing user agents page, which had previously listed as the user agent.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www. bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/ WXYZ Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/ WXYZ Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
This document documents the new user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
A little history. Microsoft Bing introduced new Bingbot user agent names in 2019. These names were more compatible with the evergreen Bingbot rendering and crawling service. In April 2022, Microsoft also announced a name shift for Bingbot . Microsoft informed us in December that the new Bingbot user agents would be 100% available by January 2023.
Old user agent. Microsoft stated that it will cease using its historical user agent in the Fall 2022. This is how the user agent looks.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
A new user-agent. Bing will use a new user-agent to identify the version of Microsoft Edge that is crawling your website. This is the format for desktop and mobile.
Desktop – Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Mobile – Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
“W.X.Y.Z.” will be replaced with the most recent Microsoft Edge version Bing uses, for eg. “100.0.4896.127”.
Why do we care? It is likely that you should have been aware of this change since it was first announced in 2019. This change could have a negative impact on your site if you use BingBot user agent detection methods. To verify that the new user agent is supported on your site, make sure you test it. While most sites don’t need to worry about it, if your site has been subject to advanced bot detection, you might need to take steps in order to update the scripts.
If you don’t make the required changes, Bing will default to the old user agent.
The post New Bingbot User-Agent Now Fully Live was first published on Search Engine Land.