AI search crawlers
AzureAI-SearchBot is a bot operated by Microsoft that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. AzureAI-SearchBot crawls web pages on behalf of Azure AI Search customers who point an indexer at a public site. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.
Request says
"AzureAI-SearchBot"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for AzureAI-SearchBot. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | AzureAI-SearchBotToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Microsoft |
| Purpose | AI search crawlers |
| Respects robots.txt | No policy |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | AzureAI-SearchBot |
| Operator documentation | None published |
AzureAI-SearchBot crawls web pages on behalf of Azure AI Search customers who point an indexer at a public site. The traffic belongs to that customer rather than to Microsoft Search.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Allow: /User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking AzureAI-SearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
AzureAI-SearchBot is a bot operated by Microsoft that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. AzureAI-SearchBot crawls web pages on behalf of Azure AI Search customers who point an indexer at a public site. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.
Not documented. No operator statement says whether AzureAI-SearchBot reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.
You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.
Add the AzureAI-SearchBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.
Blocking AzureAI-SearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.