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Martin Splitt from Google said on Twitter that the new name for the user agent for GoogleBot should now be 100% live. The new user agent name is dynamic, meaning, it will show the latest version of Chrome that GoogleBot is using to crawl and render your web pages. He said on Twitter "The UA should have rolled out to 100% by now, btw."
Update: See the update below, this is not 100% 100%. :)
The UA should have rolled out to 100% by now, btw.
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 4, 2020
As you know, GoogleBot is now using the latests Chrome browser features, which is why it is nicknamed evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn't change the user agent name when that first launched, so it was still appearing to crawl using Chrome 41, but in reality, it was using a more modern version of Chrome. Then Google said it will update the user agent name. It started to roll out and for fetching resources it continued to use the old name.
But now, according to Martin Split at Google the new name for GoogleBot's user agent name is fully live.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Well, maybe not fully live...
Can take a while to roll out to all data centers, but one way or another: It's been the evergreen one either way :)
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 5, 2020
Oh right, the crawl might still say 41 and WRS uses the new UA. Huh, I thought we changed both.
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 5, 2020
The phrasing confused me as WRS ("the one that does rendering") also fetches resources and I'm thinking that uses the new UA. But the initial crawl before rendering (the one that passes the HTML to WRS) is possibly unchanged.
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 5, 2020
The phrasing confused me as WRS ("the one that does rendering") also fetches resources and I'm thinking that uses the new UA. But the initial crawl before rendering (the one that passes the HTML to WRS) is possibly unchanged.
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 5, 2020
Sometimes WRS will fetch the page again as well...it'll use the new UA, too.
— Martin Splitt at #FOS20 (@g33konaut) February 5, 2020
A bunch of services might fetch things themselves too.. They have to specify a UA and may use either of them.
