Skip to main content

Microsoft to go fully live with new Bingbot user-agent change in January 2023

Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel has said that in early January 2023, the new BingBot will be responsible for 100% of Bing’s crawling activity. The new user agent is now responsible for about 50% of all crawls.

Some history. In 2019, Microsoft Bing announced new Bingbot user-agent names that fit better with its evergreen Bingbot crawling and rendering service. Then in April 2022, Microsoft announced a name change, a user agent name change, for BingBot.

January 2023. Next month, in the coming weeks, the new BingBot user agent will be responsible for 100% of all crawling from Bing. Fabrice Canel wrote, “will go to 100% early January” for BingBot’s new name. He added they are still at 50% now because they wanted to be extra safe.

Old user-agent. Microsoft said it would stop using its historical user agent by the Fall of 2022. That user-agent looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://ift.tt/yQxtLFq)

New user-agent. Bing will use a user-agent that identifies the specific version of Microsoft Edge is crawling your site. Here is the format for both desktop and mobile:

Desktop – Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://ift.tt/yQxtLFq) 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://ift.tt/yQxtLFq)

“W.X.Y.Z” will be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version Bing is using, for eg. “100.0.4896.127″.

Why we care. You probably should have been prepared for this change since it was announced back in 2019. But in any event, this change can impact your site if you have any user agent detection methods for BingBot. Make sure to test your site to see if it supports the new user agent. Most sites probably do not need to worry about this, but if you have done any advanced bot detection, you may need to take steps to update those scripts.

The post Microsoft to go fully live with new Bingbot user-agent change in January 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land.



from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/t6PJUSp
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Legit Reviews

The google review thing is insane I have gotten 2 legit verified reviews that i ask client to screenshot and observe goolge not post them, pretend like they never happened and when i sent them the image a policy message was sent . As I was browsing through the google forum a lot of ppl are getting hit with legit reviews being removed. While all this is going on i have observe a company go from 12 reviews to 65 reviews in a two month period with some stuff that dont make sense on some of them. Seems like a new business or profile is being limited while aged accounts can have a free for fall but who really knows. Still waiting for a resolution on a if any. submitted by /u/Ok-Bowl-6167 [link] [comments] from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/zkbfgDH
Post a Comment
Read more

Local seo vs. natiowide seo?

I've done SEO for local businesses but I recently got my first client that sells an item nation wide. ​ Any suggestions for doing nationwide SEO? ​ I am used to making geopages for local towns. I was going to do the same with some input from the client about what cities or towns he would like to show up in? submitted by /u/Letmeinterviewyou [link] [comments] from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News http://bit.ly/2JHy0k0
Post a Comment
Read more

7 SEO Lessons I've Learned in 2025 (So Far) - From Building a Competitor Analysis Tool

Hey r/SEO , I've been spending a lot of time lately building a competitor keyword research tool (more on that below!), and it's really forced me to dig deep into how SEO works today . Here are some of the key lessons I've learned – hopefully, they're helpful to you too: Keyword Gaps Are Gold: It's not enough to just know what keywords your competitors rank for. You need to know what they rank for that you don't . This is where the real opportunities lie. Focusing on these "gap" keywords has been a game-changer for my own site. (This is actually why I built the tool – to make finding these gaps easier). Relevance > Volume (Sometimes): High search volume is great, but relevance is even more important. A keyword with 100 searches per month that's perfectly aligned with your niche and audience is often more valuable than a keyword with 10,000 searches that's only tangentially related. I've seen much better results targeting tho...
Post a Comment
Read more