Root redirect

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for this amazing plugin. It works very well and makes multilingual WordPress websites a breeze to work with.

I noticed an issue today on all the websites I own with Polylang installed.

When I live test the root of my websites (“/”) with Google Search Console, Google Bot Desktop is able to access it – it is redirected with a 302 with my current setups.
I am surprised by this behavior since the root is supposed to be redirected to the main language with a 302 (I didn’t choose to detect the user’s browser language). Fortunately, Google sees a canonical pointing to the page it should redirect to. However, in one of the case, Google chose to ignore this directive… Hence my question here.

My question is: why is the Google Bot Desktop able to access the root?
I tested with different crawlers emulating the Google Bot Desktop user-agent and the tools in question were seeing a 302 redirect. Does Polylang check the user-agent or something before deciding to redirect?

A little bit of context regarding my setup : my websites are bi-lingual (French and English), French is the main version. I don’t force the language detection using the user’s browser but I did activate the use of a sub folder for each language, including for the homepage – ie, the root shouldn’t be accessible.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!