Googlebot evergreen rendering in our testing tools
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Today we updated most of our testing tools so they are using the evergreen Chromium renderer. This affects our testing tools like the mobile-friendly test or the URL inspection tool in Search Console. In this post we look into what this means and what went into making this update happen.
At its core the update is a switch from Chrome 41 as the rendering engine to the latest stable Chromium. Googlebot is now using the latest stable Chromium to run JavaScript and render pages. We will continue to update Googlebot along with the stable Chromium, hence we call it "evergreen".
A JavaScript-powered demo website staying blank in the old Googlebot but working fine in the new Googlebot. |
While the previous version of the mobile-friendly test doesn't show the page content, the new version does. |
The change will affect the rendering within the following tools:
- Search Console's URL inspection tool
- Mobile-friendly test
- Rich results test
- AMP test
Note: The new Googlebot still uses the same user agent as before the update. There will be more information about an update to the user agent in the near future. For now, Googlebot's user agent and the user agent used in the testing tools does not change.
We are excited about this update and are looking forward to your feedback and questions on Twitter, the webmaster forum or in our webmaster office hours.