Bingbot: Microsoft's search crawler
Microsoft's crawler for Bing.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
Bingbot at a glance
Everything Microsoft documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- Microsoft
- Type
- Search engines
- Used for
- Bing search, which also feeds Copilot
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Microsoft documents that Bingbot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
- robots.txt token
Bingbot- User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
- IP addresses
- www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json
- Reverse DNS
- Resolves to *.search.msn.com
How to block Bingbot
Crawls for a search engine's index. Blocking it removes your pages from that search engine, and from the AI answers built on it (AI Overviews on Googlebot, Copilot on Bingbot).
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to Bingbot.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
How to verify Bingbot
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "Bingbot" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against Microsoft's published list (www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json). A request from outside it is not Bingbot, whatever it says.
- 3
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. A genuine request resolves to a host under search.msn.com, and a forward lookup of that host returns the same IP.
- 4
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other AI crawlers
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Microsoft's crawler for Bing. The Bing index also feeds Microsoft Copilot's web answers, so a page Bingbot cannot read is missing from both.
Yes. Microsoft documents that Bingbot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: Bingbot" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses Microsoft publishes at your firewall.
Yes. Microsoft Copilot's web answers draw on Bing's index, so a page Bingbot cannot read is missing from Copilot too.
Checked against Microsoft's documentation on 29 September 2026.
Next: see whether AI recommends you
Letting the right crawlers in is the first step. AskWatch shows what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI answer when buyers ask about your category, and who they name.
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