Alternate Googlebot UA

[lucy24]

This one showed up two days ago:

66.249.64.129 - - [18/May/2018:09:31:20 -0700] "GET /dir/dirstyles.css HTTP/1.1" 200 4993 "http://www.example.com/dir/pagename.html" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Safari/537.36" 

For comparison purposes, here’s the standard (non-Android) Googlebot:

66.249.64.203 - - [19/May/2018:19:00:17 -0700] "GET /dir/dirstyles.css HTTP/1.1" 200 3465 "http://www.example.com/dir/subdir/pagename.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" 

So far it seems to be an alternative to, not a replacement of, the more familiar version. I've only seen it requesting scripts and stylesheets. (For those who don't pay close attention: The referer is normal; it's been doing that consistently for a couple of years for all css and js files.)

[keyplyr]

Thanks for the heads-up.

So the new one includes Apple product attributes. Wonder why?

[lucy24]

Wonder why?

That struck me too. An ordinary Chrome UA, including the Android used for the current mobile Googlebot, contains the elements “AppleWebKit” and “Safari”--but it also says “Chrome”. (I believe the current Opera throws in three names, just to confuse us: Safari, Chrome, Opera, in that order.)