Valentin Pletzer didn’t want to just take Google’s word that the new evergreen GoogleBot is live, so he tested it. In short, Google’s word was the truth and the new GoogleBot is indeed live.
He basically replicated what DeepCrawl saw when Google was testing the new Googlebot back in April. He said he used the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which showed the old GoogleBot – we know the testing tools are currently not using the new GoogleBot. But then when it pushed GoogleBot to the queue to crawl the page, he saw the new GoogleBot go at it.
URL Inspection tool “Test Live URL” still results in rendering with Chrome 41 shows that Googlebot is not able to access a lot of the modern browser features whereas the request indexing part can (green vs red):
I ran a quick test on “URL Inspection”. “Test Live URL” still results in rendering with Chrome 41 while “Request indexing” resulted in Chrome 74. #google #seo cc @rustybrick @glenngabe ht @DeepCrawl pic.twitter.com/yJkVeILhsi
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) May 14, 2019
So this is just some real evidence Google is not lying to us, despite the useragent still showing Chrome 41.
Forum discussion at Twitter.