Bizarre googlebot behavior today

[SumGuy]

Very strange set of hits from googlebot today. User-agent was this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.7258.154 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Have not seen that exact UA before - only from these (today's) hits. IP's were only these three:

66.249.64.224
66.249.64.233
66.249.64.234

Mostly the last two. Historically many many thousands of hits from 66.249.64.0/24, but only a few hundred from the 230's.

What was requested - 3 dozen requests, mostly phone numbers. So the requested item wasn't a file, it was a phone number. 10 digit number. Sometimes just a string of 10 digits, sometimes xxx-xxx-xxxx. A few addresses. Possibly one or two names, and in one case an odd phrase. Whenever there were multiple words, they were separated with dashes, not spaces.

Anyone else seeing this?

[lucy24]

Funny, that sounds more like what I’d expect from the bingbot. It seems to like attaching someone else’s filepaths to my hostname, yielding plentiful 404s. (Do they taste good? Does it keep them in a display cabinet? Who knows.)

Historically many many thousands of hits from 66.249.64.0/24, but only a few hundred from the 230's.

Heh. I’ve never narrowed it down so closely. Instead I am currently dealing with the aggravation of, after untold years of doing all their crawling from the familiar 66.249.64.0/20, at some time when I wasn’t looking they added the entire 192.178/15. With the predictable result that they’ve been eating 403s for months* until I happened to notice.

But I digress.

they were separated with dashes, not spaces

By spaces, do you mean %20 ?

* Quick detour to raw logs tells me the reason I never noticed until quite recently is that they never hit my main site from this IP until very late in August, although other sites have seen scattered visits since the beginning of the year.