Bingbot goes evergreen, just like Googlebot

In a recent announcement, Microsoft confirmed that Bingbot is going evergreen, just like Googlebot. As per the announcement, Bing will adopt the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser for rendering web pages and running JavaScript with Bingbot.

Before this, there used to be a fragmentation on the web. This change will remove that fragmentation to some extent and simplify lives for SEOs and web developers.

This is what Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager of Microsoft Bing, said about this change:

“By adopting Microsoft Edge, Bingbot will now render all web pages using the same underlying web platform technology already used today by Googlebot, Google Chrome, and other Chromium-based browsers. This will make it easy for developers to ensure their web sites and their Content Management System work across all these solutions without having to spend time investigating each solution in depth.

By disclosing our new Bingbot Web Pages rendering technology, we are ensuring fewer SEO compatibility problems moving forward and increase satisfaction in the SEO community.”

This news was somewhat of a surprise in the SEO world, as Microsoft has never revealed this much amount of information about Bing’s internet crawling engine. But this is a welcome change, indeed, as developers and SEOs will find it easier to get their pages crawled by both search engines — Google and Bing — without having to spend extra time troubleshooting or researching for each web crawler.

Do site owners have to worry?

Not really. Bingbot will gradually switch to Microsoft Edge over the next few months. For the most part, website owners won’t have to worry about anything substantial.

Here is what the announcement mentioned:

Over the next few months, we will be switching to Microsoft Edge “under the hood”, gradually over time. The key aspects of this evolution will be transparent for most sites. We may change our bingbot crawler user-agent as appropriate to allow rendering on some sites.

For most web sites, there is nothing you should really need to worry as we will carefully test that they dynamically render fine before switching them to Microsoft Edge.”

Just make sure that your website is registered with the Bing Webmaster Tools in case there are any issues detected with your website after the change.