In an announcement, Google said that a number of the testing tools available within Google Search Console or the Google developer portal are now using the new evergreen Googlebot for crawling.
Google launched what is being called evergreen Googlebot three months ago, and basically, it means that Googlebot will crawl the web using the latest version of Chromium, which is what we see when we launch Chrome and browse the web. Both Chrome and Googlebot will use the same rendering image.
Since its launch three months ago, Google now supports and will continue supporting the latest version of Chrome. Whatever we see in Chrome, what Googglebot sees and what Google shows you in its testing should all match.
Which tools currently support the evergreen Googlebot? Here is waht Google listed:
- Search Console‘s URL inspection tool
- Mobile-friendly test
- Rich results test
- AMP test
It seems that Google didn’t want to change the useragent yet, so that would be why you might be looking at your log files and you notice that Googlebot’s useragent will still reference the old Chrome version number.
In the future, the will change the number, but for now, the useragent is the same to not cause problems for the folks who hardcoded in specific commands for Googlebot based on the current useragent.
Google wrote “The new Googlebot still uses the same user agent as before the update. There will be more information about an update to the user agent in the near future. For now, Googlebot’s user agent and the user agent used in the testing tools does not change.”
The following image shows the mobile friendly testing tool that shows you what one site might look like before and after this update.
