Microsoft said that it will discontinue utilising the old BingBot user agent next month after several years of testing.
According to Microsoft's Fabrice Canel, the new BingBot will be in charge of all of Bing's crawling activities starting in early January 2023. At this time, around 50% of all crawls are carried out using the new user agent.
a little history With its evergreen Bingbot crawling and rendering service, Microsoft Bing revealed new Bingbot user-agent names in 2019. Then, in April 2022, Microsoft declared a name change for BingBot, a change in user agent.
January, 2023 The new BingBot user agent will be in charge of all Bing's crawling starting next month and for the next few weeks. For BingBot's new moniker, Fabrice Canel remarked, "will move to 100% early January." He said that because they wanted to be extra careful, they are currently staying at 50%.
outdated user agent. By the fall of 2022, Microsoft indicated it will discontinue utilising its previous user agent. This is how that user-agent appears:
Bingbot 2.0 and Mozilla/5.0 (both compatible; see +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
user-agent is new. When scanning your website, Bing will utilise a user-agent to determine which version of Microsoft Edge is being used. The format is as follows for desktop and mobile:
Desktop: KHTML, similar to Gecko, compatible; Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm; bingbot/2.0 Chrome/537.36 Safari/W.X.Y.Z
Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P; Mozilla/5.0 for mobile AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) (KHTML, like Gecko) Bingbot/2.0; compatible with Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm
The most recent Microsoft Edge version that Bing is using, for example "100.0.4896.127," will be used in place of "W.X.Y.Z."
why we care Since this change was disclosed back in 2019, you should have likely been ready for it. In any case, if you utilise any user agent identification techniques for BingBot, this change may have an effect on your website. Test your website to determine whether it works with the new user agent. Although most websites generally don't need to worry about this, if you've done any advanced bot identification, you could need to take some action to update those scripts.
