– Malicious crawlers often fake the Googlebot user agent to bypass paywalls or scrape content. A poorly coded scraper might invent a version number like 3.2.5 because its developer guessed the next logical increment.
If your server logs show frequent, incomplete crawls or bots abandoning pages halfway, you might have "cracked lips syndrome." Real causes include:
When SEOs talk about a "Googlebot with cracked lips," they are personifying the crawler as a thirsty entity. If your site is "dry," the bot’s metaphorical lips crack as it tries to scrape your pages. In other words, your server is so slow or broken that even a bot suffers.
“I noticed a bot in my logs claiming to be ‘Google Search Bot version 3.2.5’ — but real Googlebot doesn’t use that format. Upon checking, the user agent was spoofed. Also, strangely, many requests from this IP had ‘cracked lips’ in the referrer or query string. Has anyone else seen this?”
So where does the "version 3.2.5" come from? This is likely a —SEO professionals assigning their own version numbers to observed changes in crawling behavior, or a misinterpretation of a third-party crawler spoofing Googlebot.
: While Googlebot is "evergreen" (meaning it always uses the latest version of Chrome to render pages), specific third-party automated scripts or productivity-tracking applications have been seen using the name "Google Search Bot v3.2.5" as far back as 2014. Scam Alert