Announcing future user-agents for Bingbot

As announced in October, Bing is adopting the new Microsoft Edge as the engine to run JavaScript and render web pages. We have already switched to Microsoft Edge for thousands of web sites “under the hood”. This evolution was transparent for most of the sites and we carefully tested to check whether each website is rendering fine on switching to Microsoft Edge. Over the coming months, we will scale this migration to cover all the sites.

So far, we were crawling using an existing bingbot user-agents. With this change, we will start the transition to a new bingbot user-agent, first for sites which require it for rendering and then gradually and carefully to all sites.  

Bingbot user-agents today 

• Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) 
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) 
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) 

In addition to the existing user-agents listed above, following are the new evergreen Bingbot user-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 Edg/W.X.Y.Z 

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 Edg/W.X.Y.Z (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) 

We are committing to regularly update our web page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge thus making the above user agent strings to be evergreen. Thus, "W.X.Y.Z" will be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version we're using, for example “80.0.345.0". 

How to test your web site 

For most web sites, there is nothing to worry as we will carefully test the sites to dynamically render fine before switching them to Microsoft Edge and our new user-agent.

We invite you to install and test the new Microsoft Edge to check if your site looks fine with it. If it does then you will not be affected by the change. You can also register your site on Bing Webmaster Tools to get insights about your site, to be notified if we detect issues and to investigate your site using our upcoming tools based on our new rendering engine. 

We look forward to sharing more details in the future. 

Thanks, 
Fabrice Canel 
Principal Program Manager 
Microsoft – Bing

Source: Bing Blog Feed