Microsoft Bing Will Cease Utilizing Its Previous BingBot Person-Agent

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing announced on the Bing blog that the search company will retire the legacy BingBot user-agent in the Fall of 2022. Instead, Bing will use a user-agent that is more representative of its evergreen BingBot rendering engine. Bing announced the new user agents back in 2019 but I guess this now means the old one is going away for good.

So out with this user agent by the Fall of 2022:

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

In with these two new user agents by the Fall of 2022:

Desktop:

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

Mobile:

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

The “WXYZ” in the strings above, would be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version Bing is using for crawling, such as “100.0.4896.127”.

If you hard code anything for user agents, you should update those details.

As an FYI, Google did the same thing with Googlebot user agents a two years ago.

Forum discussion at Twitter.