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Google has added a new user agent to the list of Google crawlers, Googlebots. This one is named Google-InspectionTool and goes under both the Googlebot user agent and also the name Google-InspectionTool.
Google added this to the Google crawler help document over here. It says, "Google-InspectionTool is the crawler used by Search testing tools such as the Rich Result Test and URL inspection in Search Console. Apart from the user agent and user agent token, it mimics Googlebot."
The user agent tokens for this is both:
- Google-InspectionTool
- Googlebot
It also has two full user agent strings, one for desktop and one for mobile, they include:
- 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; Google-InspectionTool/1.0) - Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
John Mueller from Google notified me of this on Mastodon when he said "The update is now complete -- the new user-agent names are in."
Here is a screenshot of the new sections that was added to the help document:
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
Update: Here is what it looks like:
Quick update on this. @johnmu pinged me on Mastodon that the desktop test in the Rich Results test should now return the new Google-InspectionTool user-agent. And he's right. Just tested again and the correct user-agent shows up. pic.twitter.com/lzlfYHo162
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 22, 2023
