Google is updating their smartphone user-agent on April 18, 2016. Make sure to test your web site to
ensure it will allow Googlebot in.
Google announced on the Google Webmaster blog that on April 18, 2016, they will be updating their
user-agent for the smartphone Googlebot crawler. The user-agent will change from an iPhone user-agent
to an Android user-agent, but it should have no impact on 99% of all web sites, says Google.
Here is the new Googlebot martphone user-agent that kicks in on April 18, 2016:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Here is the current smartphone user-agent for Googlebot that we have today:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
The main difference you can see here is that Google is replacing the Apple iPhone and Safari string from
the user-agent and replacing it with Android and Chrome.
Google said they are making this change so that their “renderer can better understand pages that use
newer web technologies.” Google added that as the web evolved they decided to change the “user-agent
string indicates that that it is becoming more similar to Chrome than Safari.” Google said their
“evaluation suggests that this user-agent change should have no effect on 99% of sites.”
