Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Today we updated most of our testing tools so they are using the
evergreen Chromium renderer. This affects our testing tools like the mobile-friendly test or the
URL inspection tool in Search Console. In this post we look into what this means and what went
into making this update happen.
The evergreen Chromium renderer
At Google I/O this year we were happy to announce
the new evergreen Googlebot.
At its core the update is a switch from Chrome 41 as the rendering engine to the latest stable
Chromium. Googlebot is now using the latest stable Chromium to run JavaScript and render pages. We
will continue to update Googlebot along with the stable Chromium, hence we call it “evergreen”.
What this means for your websites
We are very happy to bring the latest features of the web platform not only to Googlebot but to
the tools that let you see what Googlebot sees as well. This means websites using ES6+, Web
Components and
1000+ new web platform features
are now rendered with the latest stable Chromium, both in Googlebot and our testing tools.
What the update changes in our testing tools
Our testing tools reflect how Googlebot processes your pages as closely as possible. With the
update to the new Googlebot, we had to update them to use the same renderer as Googlebot.
The change will affect the rendering within the following tools:
- Search Console‘s URL inspection tool
- Mobile-friendly test
- Rich results test
- AMP test
We tested these updates and based on the feedback we have switched the tools listed previously to
the new evergreen Googlebot. A lot of the feedback came from Googlers and the community.
Product Experts and
Google Developer Experts
helped us make sure the update works well.
Note: The new Googlebot still uses the same
user agent
as before the update. There will be more information about an update to the user agent in the near
future. For now, Googlebot’s user agent and the user agent used in the testing tools does not
change.
We are excited about this update and are looking forward to your feedback and questions on
Twitter, the
webmaster forum
or in our
webmaster office hours.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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