Google Adds Google-InspectionTool To Crawlers

Google has added a new user agent to the list of Google crawlers, Googlebots. This one is named Google-InspectionTool and goes under both the Googlebot user agent and also the name Google-InspectionTool.

Google added this to the Google crawler help document over here. It says, “Google-InspectionTool is the crawler used by Search testing tools such as the Rich Result Test and URL inspection in Search Console. Apart from the user agent and user agent token, it mimics Googlebot.”

The user agent tokens for this is both:

• Google-InspectionTool
• Googlebot

It also has two full user agent strings, one for desktop and one for mobile, they include:

• Mobile
  
  Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
• Desktop
  
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)

John Mueller from Google notified me of this on Mastodon when he said “The update is now complete — the new user-agent names are in.”

Here is a screenshot of the new sections that was added to the help document:

Forum discussion at Mastodon.