New study confirms Google doesn’t use Chrome browser data to discover new URLs

GoogleBot did not visit a test page that Chrome accessed days before.

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Google Chrome Tools Development Ss 1920

Stone Temple Consulting has published a new study supporting Google’s claim that it doesn’t use Chrome browser data for discovering new URLs for its search index.

The test was pretty simple: They created a “couple of pages that Google didn’t know about,” then they had “a bunch of people visit those pages from a Chrome browser.” They then waited to see if GoogleBot would visit the page to do a full crawl of the content, and GoogleBot never showed up.

Eric Enge, the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, said the results showed “Googlebot never came to visit either page in the test… This is a remarkable result. Google has access to an enormous amount of data from Chrome, and it’s hard to believe that they don’t use it in some fashion.”


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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