Googlebot iPhone User Agent

[lucy24]

Had to stare at this for several minutes before I figured out why it didn't get auto-ignored by my log processing routine.

One-off:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Established form:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

It may of course just be a glitch as opposed to a change in UA. But I'm keeping eyes peeled.

[incrediBILL]

What's the IP?

Without that this is purely speculation but I would assume Googlebot might want to see any content targeted directly for iOS devcies and that UA is a good way to get to that content.

All it means to me is I have some of the most awesome user agent testing regex code that is now sorely in need of updating thanks to Googlebot. ;)

[wilderness]

I saw an announcement for this UA and the G-Phone somewhere.

Don't recall if it was thread here at WW, or somewhere else.

[thetrasher]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[lucy24]

What's the IP?

Google. The ordinary 66.249.something range. If it had been a non-google IP, I wouldn't even have posted.

@thetrasher:
Oops. Don't know how I overlooked that. Weird that they just tried it once per site on the first day instead of changing across the board. (I found another on a different site after posting.)

[keyplyr]

The new mobile UA is all I've seen for a couple days now. Had to edit my filters. Didn't need to leave the old UA rules up.

[incrediBILL]

I'd still like the IP as the reverse IP gives a clue as to if it's the real deal meaning an actual Googlebot, or something being tested, and I like to know what IPs are running what UAs.

It should always accompany a post like this IMO.

[lucy24]

66.249.73.40 - - [04/Feb/2014:00:17:52 -0800] "GET /paintings/refrats/callalilies.html HTTP/1.1" 200 1765 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

In that day's logs, all "iPhone" googlebots used this identical IP. But only this one was Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile. The same goes for the two other places I've seen iPhone Googlebot so far: all the same IP, including the one without -Mobile.

[wilderness]

This is absurd!
With the current method there is not any way to differentiate between the regular Googlebot and the Googlebot-Mobile.

At least with the old UA (Googlebot-Mobile) it could be excluded and honored in robots.txt.


66.249.73.29 - - [17/Feb/2014:06:08:15 -0700] "GET /MySub/MyPage.html HTTP/1.1" 200 22190 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

66.249.73.29 - - [17/Feb/2014:06:12:20 -0700] "GET /MyFile.css HTTP/1.1" 200 1321 "http://www.example.com/MySub/MySubSub/MyPage.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"