Google retires StoreBot user agent version in favor of placeholders
This is a minor change that will help with maintenance
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Google has recently made some changes to its user agent, and this is a minor change, so it probably won’t affect online websites too much.
Join us while we take a look at this change, and see what’s new.
Google updates the Google StoreBot user agent version
It seems that Google has made some minor changes to its Google StoreBot User Agent as Search Engine Roundtable reports.
In the past, the Google StoreBot user agent used a static version. If you take a look at Google Developers documentation, you can see that this has been changed.
Instead of an actual version, the user agent shows Chrome/W.X.Y.Z. This represents a placeholder for the version of the Chrome browser that is used by that agent.
The version number will change accordingly to match the latest Chromium release version used by Googlebot.
According to Google, if you’ve hardcoded the old value in your code, you need to update it to ignore this version. This is a minor change, and according to Google, it was implemented to make maintaining the StoreBot crawler easier.
Speaking of Google and its products, Chrome has been recently updated and now it provides better search suggestions, so if you haven’t tried it, be sure to check it out.
