Austin, TX - A new Google crawler specifically targeting Apple mobile device configurations has been discovered by Carolyn Holzman, lead SEO researcher at American Way Media.

The crawler was first seen on January 30, 2025. They came from an IP address listed within Google's crawler IP range and a reverse DNS lookup confirmed registration to Google, LLC.

Holzman, deeply versed into Google's indexation system, has been daily observing, measuring and monitoring the indexation process, for over three and half years.

The indexation research project was in response to 90 days in 2021 in which it was determined that javascript rendering was either broken or halted which caused sites with heavy javascript frameworks to drop precipitously in rankings.

Each day new tests are launched with a two-fold purpose - on each test page there are two test keywords. One keyword is designed to confirm if html crawling is operating and a second one, if javascript rendering is being processed and served. This testing data is updated on a daily basis and recorded as a 3rd party resource to provide context for SERP volatility or updates for SEO professionals.

During the course of her research, this new crawler was detected in server logs with an identifiable crawling pattern that matches Googlebot's standard html and render crawling behavior on January 30th and January 31st.

The user agent string appeared in logs with this crawler string - "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1)".

"Crawl or No Crawl research project has been tracking changes in Google's indexation patterns and systems for quite some time," said Holzman. "This discovery suggests Google may be developing more specialized crawling capabilities for iOS and iPadOS content, though it's unclear at this time whether this is simply a testing phase or in preparation of a broader deployment."

This is the first introduction of a new crawler observed by Holzman's research not proactively announced via traditional Google channels.

"I've seen hints of more platform-specific optimization in Google's Chrome-based crawlers," said Holzman. "Recent updates to Chrome versions used by Googlebot have introduced specialized Profile-Guided Optimization templates, starting with Chrome 131 in late December 2024. These optimizations expanded to include specific profiles for Mac ARM and Linux platforms throughout January 2025."

"It is possible that this new mobile crawler might be an outgrowth of these efficiency improvements," Holzman continued. "While I'm not seeing changes in how content is crawled, the Chrome builds used by recent Googlebots have focused on improving processing efficiency, particularly for JavaScript content."

The discovery of this new crawler coincided with Googlebot's upgrade to Chrome 132.0.6834.159 on January 30th.

American Way Media is a leading forensic SEO firm specializing in search engine behavior and indexation patterns. The company's "Crawl or No Crawl" research initiative represents a comprehensive study of search engine crawling and indexation systems, providing valuable insights for the broader digital marketing community. IndexZilla™ a new indexing platform not based on Google's indexing API, offers indexing services based on Holzman's research and testing.

Holzman is also host of the acclaimed podcast - Confessions of An SEO - a short-form podcast listed on Semrush’s list of the Top 10 SEO Podcasts recommendations on their blog.

To stay informed on this crawler as more information comes forward, parties are invited to join Crawl or No Crawl, Holzman's supporter sponsored research where she shares these details with members multiple times per week.

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