As a reminder, since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. It should have rolled out to 100% of all crawls last month. But now Fabrice Canel said this week that it is near 100%, and an announcement is coming sometime today from Microsoft.
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing wrote on Twitter, "We are near 100% and are proactively monitoring and rolling back any website having issues. Stay tuned for more communication Friday."
Initially, Bing said it would be rolled out by Fall 2022, then January 2023. Maybe today is the day?
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
- February 2023: New 100% of all crawls
Let's see what Fabrice announces today.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Confirmed, it is fully live according to Fabrice on LinkedIn.
Yes @rustybrick 💯% today (we fallback to previous user agents where appropriate). More information on Bing Crawler User Agents: https://t.co/n0ILIEUz0I https://t.co/49ILtJDuL0
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 3, 2023
