Bingbot
Bingbot is a bot operated by Microsoft that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Bingbot indexes pages for Bing Search. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Bingbot can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Bingbot at a glance
| User agent | 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 |
|---|---|
| Operator | Microsoft |
| Purpose | Search indexing that also feeds Copilot answers |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP ranges or reverse DNS Reverse DNS must resolve to a search.msn.com host and forward-resolve back to the same IP. Microsoft also publishes the ranges as JSON. https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json |
| Crawl pattern | Continuous, controllable via Bing Webmaster Tools crawl control. |
| Robots.txt tokens | Bingbot |
| Operator documentation | https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26 |
Bingbot indexes pages for Bing Search. The same index grounds Microsoft Copilot answers, so a Bingbot block removes a site from Copilot citations as well as from Bing results.
Allow or block Bingbot
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.
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking Bingbot 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 onceIs that really Bingbot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Bingbot precisely because site owners allow it. Reverse DNS must resolve to a search.msn.com host and forward-resolve back to the same IP. Microsoft also publishes the ranges as JSON.
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.
Other crawlers run by Microsoft
Related crawlers
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.