Google is not crawling over HTTP / 3 but

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the Googlebot is not yet crawling over HTTP / 3. He said that if you implement HTTP / 3 for your site, it doesn’t mean it will not benefit your users and, by extension, possibly your most important web vitals metrics. But the Googlebot isn’t crawling over it yet.

That came up Twitter where Michael Kohlfürst asked John Müller (not sure if I did that right …) if Google is crawling over HTTP / 3. The truth is that Google has just started crawling over HTTP / 2 (if your website supports it). November 2020 and then said about in May 2021 half of the crawling is now done over HTTP / 2. So maybe it’s a little early for HTTP / 3 crawling?

Along with HTTP / 1.1 and HTTP / 2, HTTP / 3 is the third and upcoming major version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol for exchanging information on the World Wide Web. HTTP / 3 runs over QUIC, published as RFC 9000. As of December 2021, the HTTP / 3 protocol is still officially an Internet Draft, but is already supported by 73% of running web browsers and, according to W3Techs, 24% of the top 10 million websites. It has been supported by Google Chrome (including Chrome for Android and Microsoft Edge based on it) since April 2020 and by Mozilla Firefox since May 2021. Safari 14 (on macOS Big Sur and iOS 14) has also implemented the protocol, but the support is hidden behind a feature flag.

Here are these tweets:

I don’t think we’re crawling with http / 3, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see any positive effects for users (and thus possibly indirectly for key web vitals).

– 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 6, 2021

There’s always some risk, but it sounds like most of the big players (CDNs, servers, clients) are behind this, so I’m not too worried. It doesn’t replace any other connections, so older devices will still work.

– 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 7, 2021

So yes, having users interact with your website faster and more responsively, it can make your users happier and have an impact on your CrUX data as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.