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Google's John Mueller and Martin Splitt confirmed on Twitter that GoogleBot, despite what Chrome does, will continue to pass along the user agent when it crawls web sites. John said "my understanding is that we'll continue to use "Googlebot" in the UA text and not defer it to Client Hints."
In January, Google said it was looking for ways to deprecate the user agent in Chrome. "In a surprising move, Google’s Chromium team has submitted a new proposal that includes deprecating the User Agent string starting in Chrome 81," 9to5 Google reported.
But this seems like it won't have an impact on how or what user agent GoogleBot passes along.
Paul Shaprio asked about this on Twitter and Martin Splitt from Google said "Yeah, no. Googlebot is made out of lots of parts. The crawler, which makes the requests to your server, has nothing to do with Chrome and sends the UA you know and love. We'd have to modify that crawler to not send the UA, no matter what the renderer (chrome in WRS) does."
@g33konaut @JohnMu is Googlebot going to continue to send UA in the future when Chrome stops sending it?
— Paul Shapiro - SEO Edition (@fighto) July 20, 2020
Yeah, no. Googlebot is made out of lots of parts. The crawler, which makes the requests to your server, has nothing to do with Chrome and sends the UA you know and love. We'd have to modify that crawler to not send the UA, no matter what the renderer (chrome in WRS) does.
— Martin Splitt at 🏡🇨🇭 (@g33konaut) July 21, 2020
John Mueller from Google said "As I understand it, Chrome will still send a UA, it's just that it'll be generic. My understanding is that we'll continue to use "Googlebot" in the UA text and not defer it to Client Hints. I don't think we announced anything there yet, so I'll see if we want to make it formal."
As I understand it, Chrome will still send a UA, it's just that it'll be generic. My understanding is that we'll continue to use "Googlebot" in the UA text and not defer it to Client Hints. I don't think we announced anything there yet, so I'll see if we want to make it formal.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 20, 2020
So no changes as far as they know regarding GoogleBot.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
