Does AzureAI-SearchBot respect robots.txt?

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.

How do I block AzureAI-SearchBot?

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.

IPScanner

AI search crawlers

AzureAI-SearchBot

Q: How do I verify a request really came from AzureAI-SearchBot?

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.

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.

AzureAI-SearchBot at a glance

Reference data for the AzureAI-SearchBot crawler
User agent	`AzureAI-SearchBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Microsoft
Purpose	AI search crawlers
Respects robots.txt	Not documented
Verification method	None 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

Allow or block AzureAI-SearchBot

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block AzureAI-SearchBot

User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow AzureAI-SearchBot

User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: AzureAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

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.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really AzureAI-SearchBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy AzureAI-SearchBot precisely because site owners allow it. 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.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

Other crawlers run by Microsoft

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Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ