Googlebot Identifies Smartphone Content With New User-Agent

By Matt McGee

Published: December 15, 2011 at 3:52 pm

Google has announced that its mobile crawler now has a user-agent that’s specific to smartphones. The company has already had a user-agent that targets feature phones.

The new Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +https://www.google.com/bot.html)

As part of today’s announcement, Google is also introducing a feature called “Skip Redirect for Smartphone-Optimized Pages.” Here’s how the blog post describes it:

When we discover a URL in our search results that redirects smartphone users to another URL serving smartphone-optimized content, we change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the final destination URL. This removes the extra latency the redirect introduces leading to a saving of 0.5-1 seconds on average when visiting landing page for such search results.

With this new smartphone-specific user-agent, Google is advising webmasters to make sure they serve appropriate content for each mobile crawler.

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About the author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.