Since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said while the new BingBot is still only doing 50% of all crawls, it will move to 100% of all crawls in early January.
Fabrice wrote on Twitter that the new BingBot is "still 50%" of all crawls. "We wanted to be extra-safe over the holidays and will go to 100% early January," he added.
Note, initially Bing said it would be rolled out by Fall 2022.
Here are those tweets:
Still 50%... we wanted to be extra-safe over the holidays and will go to 100% early January. Thanks, Bing family is doing very well. Wishing you @rustybrick and your family and friends, happy holidays.
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) December 20, 2022
Here has been the rollout so far:
- April 2022: Less than 5% of crawls
- July 2022: 5% of all crawls
- September 2022: 20% of all crawls
- October 2022: 50% of all crawls
So are you ready for the new BingBot 100% of the time?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
