Google has launched a new crawler, a new Googlebot, called Google-InspectionTool. This new Google crawler will be how Google identifies crawling activity for the crawler using Google Search testing tools, such as the rich results test and Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool .
Google-Inspection Tool. Google published details about this new tracker in its help document this way. It says: “Google-InspectionTool is the crawler used by search testing tools such as rich results testing and URL inspection in Search Console. Apart from user agent and agent token of user, imitate Googlebot”.
Here is a screenshot of that documentation:
User agent. The user agent token for your crawling activity can be the classic Googlebot or the new Google-InspectionTool. Google also listed the full user agent strings that differ for mobile and desktop crawling:
Phone
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/WXYZ Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0) Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
Why we care If you are a crawler farrier and analyze the crawler activity and bot activity in the log files, you may see Google-InspectionTool appear. This is especially so if you use the rich results test and URL inspection in Google Search Console.
If you see problems with these tools doing their job, you may be blocking the Google-InspectionTool user agent from accessing your site. So make sure you allow Google-InspectionTool to crawl your site if you have strict rules.
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