User Agent Change For Bing Crawler Bingbot

[engine]

Microsoft Bing has said the user agent for Bingbot is transitioning from the historical UA by "Fall 2022" from "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"

It will change to the following agents:-

Desktop

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Mobile
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

"W.X.Y.Z" will be substituted to the current Microsoft Edge UA at the time of crawling.

Microsoft says it's already started testing the new UAs for the Live URL Test.

[blogs.bing.com...]

[lucy24]

"W.X.Y.Z" will be substituted to the current Microsoft Edge UA at the time of crawling.

Heh. Someone at Bing must have noticed that Google started doing this a few years ago with all their multitudinous User-Agents: Somewhere in the string is the robot's descriptive name, and somewhere else is the most recent version of Chrome. Saves poking holes for legitimate crawlers than unwisely call themselves Chrome/27.

[engine]

Well, now that Edge is Chrome based, it's no surprise of the change.

[edited by: engine at 8:07 am (utc) on Apr 30, 2022]