: What happens if I try to set a cookie on a bot? I'm building my site to include some user-identifying cookies. When a visitor chimes in, I will set a cookie with a unique visitor id (a

@Ogunnowo487

Most bots don't accept cookies (including Googlebot), however, some bots do.

You send a Set-Cookie header in the response, but the bot does not send back a Cookie header in subsequent requests - so the cookie is effectively lost. Whether Google is monitoring whether the site is setting cookies, we don't know for sure, but I'd wager they probably are. However, this information is not used in the search results.

When Googlebot visits your site it's like they have never visited before, which goes for any real users who have disabled their cookies.

Further reading: Does googlebot keep session when crawling?



One way to handle the situation of generating a unique visitor ID (guid) is... if the cookie doesn't exist (either a new user or the cookie hasn't been set for whatever reason) then attempt to set a cookie with your real guid, but use a hash of the user agent and IP address as the guid for the current request (which is distinguishable from the real guid). It's not perfect (it's not entirely unique), but it at least allows you to more easily track the bots and importantly avoids counting 1000's of unreal visitors (if you are relying solely on a cookie to count visitors).

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