Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed that Googlebot does indeed support Brotli compression. Brotli is a data format specification for data streams compressed with a specific combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modelling. Brotli is a compression algorithm developed by Google and works best for text compression.
Gary said on Twitter he spoke with the Googlebot team and they confirmed with him that Googlebot does support this compression format.
More importantly, the tweet looked incredibly tasty:
Who asked me a few weeks ago whether Googlebot supports brotli compression?
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 31, 2020
I just had a meeting with the Googlebot team and ... it does. pic.twitter.com/hsyxExg7mW
Brotli is fairly new, it was initially released on October 15, 2013, with a stable release only on October 28, 2018. You can learn more about it on Github.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
