Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced that BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will soon be testing zstd Zstandard compression, a lossless data compression, for its crawler.
Fabrice Canel wrote on X, “Bingbot now supports Brotli compression for all URLs after a successful ramp-up to 100%!” Microsoft began testing support for BingBot Brotli compression a month ago, so it going to 100% that quickly is impressive.
He said Bing is “not stopping there,” saying that they are “Gearing up to support Zstd compression.” Microsoft will begin testing “a phased rollout to follow in the following weeks,” he added.
Here are those posts:
Bingbot now supports Brotli compression for all URLs after a successful ramp-up to 100%! Not stopping there, we’re gearing up to support Zstd compression. Testing began with a phased rollout to follow in the following weeks. #SEO
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) April 18, 2024
Google was first to use Brotli compression for Googlebot back in 2020. But Googlebot does not use Zstd compression, as far as I know. However, In March 2024, Google Chrome version 123 (and Chromium-based browsers such as Brave or Microsoft Edge) added zstd support in the HTTP header Content-Encoding.
Forum discussion at X.