Announcing user-agent change for Bing crawler bingbot

Today we are announcing that we will start to transition the following user-agents for bingbot:

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)
 

By regularly updating our web page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge we will be making the above user agent strings evergreen. In the strings above, "W.X.Y.Z" would be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version we're using, such as “100.0.4896.127". 

We will stop using our historical user-agent by Fall 2022.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

We will carefully test websites before switching them to our new user-agent Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection has already started using the new desktop user-agent for the Live URL Test to help you investigate potential issues. In case you face any challenges feel free to contact us.

Fabrice Canel
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft - Bing