So now as SEOs, you need to follow all the latest changes in Chrome because whatever support Chrome adds, it is likely that GoogleBot will support it as well with the evergreen GoogleBot.

Ilya Grigorik from the Google team posted on Twitter that the Chrome team added native lazy loading support to Chrome 76 and that means when GoogleBot is running off of 76, which should be soon, it also will natively support it.

Gary Illyes from Google asked Martin Splitt from Google to confirm this would also work for GoogleBot rendering’s engine and Martin said yes.

John Mueller from Google added a bit more context to the matter:

Again, GoogleBot is not yet on Chrome 76, but it should be soon.

Forum discussion at Twitter.