GoogleBot Help Chrome Detect & Block Abusive Notifications

Google announced on the Chrome blog that it will be adding an additional security feature to reduce notification content and is triggered by sites that have a history of sending messages containing abusive content. GoogleBot will be helping Chrome with this effort by occasionally subscribing to website push notifications if the push permission is requested.

Google explained “Google’s automated web crawling service will occasionally subscribe to website push notifications if the push permission is requested. Notifications that are sent to the automated Chrome instances, using Safe Browsing technology, will be evaluated for abusive content, and sites sending abusive notifications will be flagged for enforcement if the issue is unresolved.”

GoogleBot is pretty skilled these days, not only can it subscribe to website push notifications, it can also add products to your shopping cart. Again, here is GoogleBot helping validate abuse through techniques to fake prices on product pages versus the cart.

Google said the new enforcement in Chrome 86 focuses on notification content and is triggered by sites that have a history of sending messages containing abusive content. This treatment applies to sites that try to trick users into accepting the notification permission for malicious purposes, for example sites that use web notifications to send malware or to mimic system messages to obtain user login credentials.

Hat tip to Glenn Gabe on this.

Just to be clear, this currently has no impact on your rankings or Google Search. This is to help Chrome find and prevent abuse of push notifications on web sites.

Just to be clear, this is how Chrome uses GoogleBot, not how Google Search uses GoogleBot as Martin Splitt of Google explained below:

Yeah elaborating on the last bit of the article… Chrome is using the shared infrastructure that Googlebot uses, too. In search, we’re not doing the same thing as Chrome does here =)

— Martin Splitt @ home ???????????? (@g33konaut) October 23, 2020

Forum discussion at Twitter.