A new Googlebot user-agent for crawling smartphone content

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Over the years, Google has used different crawlers to crawl and index content for feature phones
and smartphones. These mobile-specific crawlers have all been referred to as Googlebot-Mobile.
However, feature phones and smartphones have considerably different device capabilities, and we’ve
seen cases where a webmaster inadvertently blocked smartphone crawling or indexing when they
really meant to block just feature phone crawling or indexing. This ambiguity made it impossible
for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google to recognize that these sites
are smartphone-optimized.

A new Googlebot for smartphones

To clarify the situation and to give webmasters greater control, we’ll be retiring
“Googlebot-Mobile” for smartphones as a user agent starting in 3-4 weeks’ time. From then on, the
user agent for smartphones will identify itself simply as “Googlebot” but will still list
mobile elsewhere in the user-agent string. Here are the
new and old user-agents:

The new Googlebot for smartphones user-agent

:

(updated August 2015)

The Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones user-agent we will be retiring soon:

This change affects only Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones. The user agent of the regular Googlebot
does not change, and the remaining two Googlebot-Mobile crawlers will continue to refer to feature
phone devices in their user-agent strings; for reference, these are:

Regular Googlebot user-agent:

The two Googlebot-Mobile user-agents for feature phones:

You can test your site using the
Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools,
and you can see a full list of our
existing crawlers in the Help Center.

Crawling and indexing

Please note this important implication of the user-agent update: The new
Googlebot for smartphones crawler will follow robots.txt, robots meta tag, and HTTP header
rules for Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile. For
example, when the new crawler is deployed, this robots.txt rule will block all crawling by
the new Googlebot for smartphones user-agent, and also the regular
Googlebot:

This robots.txt rule will block crawling by Google’s feature phone crawlers:

Based on our internal analyses, this update affects less than 0.001% of URLs while giving
webmasters greater control over the crawling and indexing of their content. As always, if you have
any questions, you can:

• Read our
  recommendations for building smartphone-optimized sites
• Learn more about
  controlling Googlebot crawling and indexing
• Ask in our
  Webmaster help forums
  or visit one of our
  Webmaster Central office hours hangouts.

Posted by Zhijian He, Smartphone search engineer