Google seems to have recently made the new GoogleBot user agent name that is dynamic for the evergreen GoogleBot live. Bastian Grimm said on Twitter he started noticing the new name on January 12, 2020.
Google's Martin Splitt said a month ago that the experiment was live, to test the new user agent name in the wild. Google did warn us in October about this user agent name change and then started testing it in December. I would think by now it should be live.
Here is a screen shot from Bastian of the new useragent he found in his log files:
What do you see?
yep, that one is still there as well - but less frequently. For the domains I re-checked now it's one of those below - but almost always with Chrome 41 UA (however feature detection suggest its >95% Chrome 78). pic.twitter.com/fI03azcaqn
— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) January 14, 2020
I still do see the old GoogleBot, so it might not be fully live. I also see Google testing Chrome 79:
www.seroundtable.com 10.0.1.10 185.150.234.1 15243 - [14/Jan/2020:08:46:57 -0500] "www.seroundtable.com" "GET /google-january-2020-core-update-28832.html HTTP/1.1" 200 14290 "https://www.seroundtable.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36"
But I am mostly seeing Chrome 41, the old user agent like 95% of the time:
www.seroundtable.com 10.0.1.10 66.249.65.224 221523 - [14/Jan/2020:08:46:57 -0500] "www.seroundtable.com" "GET /amp/photos/google-cigar-box-guitar-23438.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2977 "-" "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)"
Gogooglebot Chorme/78 hits by day pic.twitter.com/FVDBiucSS6
— Lino Uruñuela (@Errioxa) January 14, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
