In an announcement made by Google, beginning in December, the company is going to update its user agent to represent the version of Chrome that GoogleBot is running. It is important to update any code you have that may look at the user agent of GoogleBot to suggest this change going forward.
After the Evergreen GoogleBot was launched by Google, it intentionally kept the old user agent. The reason for this was so that anybody who might have had hard-coded any detection methods for GoogleBot wouldn’t have issues with the new Evergreen GoogleBot.
Soon, the new user agent will change to show the current version of Chrome that GoogleBot is using when crawling your website.
Before – This is what GoogleBot’s user agent looks on mobile and desktop:
Mobile:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
OR
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36
After – This is how GoogleBot’s user agent is going to look like after the change in December. The following user agent strings, “W.X.Y.Z” is going to be substituted with the Chrome version Google is using. As an example, rather than seeing W.X.Y.Z., you’re going to see something similar to “76.0.3809.100”:
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; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Desktop:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
OR
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
If you’re using any user agent detection scripts hard-coded for GoogleBot, make sure to support this new user agent pattern. Google said, “We’ve run an evaluation, so are confident that most websites will not be affected by the change.” “If your site looks for a specific user agent, it may be affected. You should use feature detection instead of user agent sniffing. If you cannot use feature detection and need to detect Googlebot via the user agent, then look for “Googlebot” within the user agent,” Google added.
If you want to make sure your pages support this after making teh change to your code or while in developement mode, here is how to test it – you can override your user agent in Chrome using these instructions.