Fabrice Canel updated us the other day that now half of all crawling Microsoft Bing does is over the new BingBot user agent. About a month ago, it was 20%, then two months prior to that it was 5%. So it seems things are moving faster to upgrade fully to the new BingBot.
Fabrice announced this on Twitter a day or so ago.
Here is the timeline thus far:
To take you back, in April, Bing announced a new user agent for its crawler, BingBot. That new BingBot will be fully live sometime in the fall of 2022, but for now, we are just in the summer and the fall is a couple of months away.
Slowly, Microsoft has been bringing this new BingBot user agent on board and now it is crawling about 50% of all URLs. In the next few months or so, it should be closer to 100% of all URLs downloaded or crawled.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
