In short. Baidu documents PC and mobile Baiduspider-render/2.0 strings for rendering resource requests.
Definition: Baidu documents
Baiduspider-render/2.0as the rendering user agent for requests for a page's CSS, JavaScript, and image resources. The documented strings have separate PC and mobile forms.
Key facts
- Baidu's rendering crawler announcement, published on 24 March 2017, says Baidu Search needs to access CSS, JavaScript, and images to understand and present pages more precisely.
- The PC and mobile strings both contain
Baiduspider-render/2.0; the mobile string also contains an iPhone and Safari browser signature. - A Baidu rollout update dated 7 June 2017 says the rendering user agent had full mobile traffic while PC coverage was still partial.
- Baidu's crawler identification guide says user agents are one part of identification and recommends two-way DNS verification for the source IP and hostname.
Which request strings does Baidu document?
The 2017 announcement labels the following forms as the latest user agents for PC and mobile requests:
PC: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider-render/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)
Mobile: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1 (compatible; Baiduspider-render/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)
Baidu says the rendering user agent accesses the site's CSS, JavaScript, and image information. The same announcement says that, from 24 March 2017, Baidu selected some high-quality sites for a crawl test and warned that the test could add pressure to site servers.
What rollout status did Baidu publish?
The June 2017 update says Baidu introduced the rendering user agent for internal testing on both mobile and PC in March 2017. It says that the mobile version then went to full traffic, while the PC version was still not fully covered. For PC site owners, the update advises keeping content valuable to search engines and users available without JavaScript loading because of possible indexing loss.
This is a dated rollout statement. It identifies the documented state in June 2017 and does not provide a later replacement string or a current request volume.
How is it different from other Baiduspider requests?
Baidu's crawler introduction defines Baiduspider as an automated program that visits web pages and builds an index database. It lists Baiduspider for web and wireless search, and names product-specific agents such as Baiduspider-image, Baiduspider-video, and Baiduspider-news. The rendering token is therefore the useful marker in the documented strings when a log entry concerns resource rendering.
The same guide says Baiduspider follows the Internet robots protocol and shows a rule that blocks the ordinary Baiduspider token:
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /
That example names ordinary Baiduspider. The rendering announcement separately asks site owners to avoid blocking the rendering user agent during the 2017 test.
How can a site verify a request?
Baidu's 2019 user-agent identification guide says the IP range changes and is not published as a fixed list. It recommends a reverse DNS lookup for the IP in the access log, checking that the Baiduspider hostname uses *.baidu.com or *.baidu.jp, then a forward lookup to confirm that the hostname resolves to the original IP. The guide gives these commands in its example:
host 111.206.198.69
host baiduspider-111-206-198-69.crawl.baidu.com
The user-agent string is a first filter. DNS checks add the verification steps described by Baidu for distinguishing a Baidu crawler from an imitation.
Related terms
FAQ
Is Baiduspider/2.0 the same string as Baiduspider-render/2.0?
No. Baidu's 2019 guide lists both forms for PC and mobile contexts. The rendering form includes the -render token, while the ordinary form uses Baiduspider/2.0.
Should a site allow the rendering user agent?
Baidu's rendering announcement asks site owners to avoid blocking the new user agent during its 2017 test. Check access logs and use the DNS procedure in Baidu's identification guide before treating a request as genuine.
Sources
- Baidu Search Resource Platform, "百度Spider新增渲染抓取UA公告", 24 March 2017
- Baidu Search Resource Platform, "百度Spider渲染UA在移动端全流量上线", 7 June 2017
- Baidu Search Resource Platform, "百度spider介绍", 24 April 2013
- Baidu Search Resource Platform, "【官方说法】只需两步，正确识别百度蜘蛛（User-Agent）", 20 May 2019
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