osoft will go live with a new Bingbot user agent change in January 2023
Fabrice Canel, Microsoft’s new BingBot’s administrator, has stated that the new BingBot would be responsible for all of Bing’s crawling activity by January 2023. About 50% of all crawls are now performed by the new user agent.
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 .
January 2023. The new BingBot user agent, which will take over 100% of all crawling from Bing, will be available in the next month. Fabrice Canel wrote and “will go up to 100% early January” in BingBot’s new title. They are at 50% right now, he said, because they wanted extra safety.
Old user agent. Microsoft stated that it will cease using its historical user agent in the Fall 2022. That user-agent looks like this: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.
The post Microsoft will go fully live with a new Bingbot user agent change in January 2023 was first published on Search Engine Land.