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Search crawler

What is bingbot?

bingbot is Microsoft's crawler for Bing search, which also feeds Microsoft Copilot answers.

Classic searchNot yet verified by usIP list
Operator
Microsoft
Purpose
Classic search. Search engines. Blocking them removes you from search results.
robots.txt token
bingbot
Sample 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/537.36User agents change with versions. Match on the token, not the full string.
Follows robots.txt
Not yet verified by us. Bing's crawler help page could not be read at our review, so we have not confirmed its statement yet.
How to verify
Check the IP against Microsoft's published list.Reverse DNS on search.msn.com, confirmed with a forward lookup.Bing has no separate AI token: it controls Copilot use with NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE meta tags.
Sources
Microsoft documentationMicrosoft IP list
Last reviewed

Allow or block bingbot

Blocking bingbot removes your pages from Microsoft search results, so we don't offer that snippet. If you need to, write the rule by hand.

Allow bingbot
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /

Lets bingbot crawl everything. You only need this if a broader rule would otherwise block it.

Should you block it?

Keep bingbot allowed. Blocking it removes your pages from Microsoft search results.

Write a full policy with the AI Crawler Policy Generator

How to verify a bingbot request

  1. Find the IP address of the request in your server or CDN logs.
  2. Get Microsoft's published list (Microsoft IP list).
  3. Check whether the IP falls inside one of the ranges. If it doesn't, the request is not from bingbot, whatever its user agent says.

Or with reverse DNS

  1. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP (host 192.0.2.1, with the IP from your log).
  2. Check the hostname ends in search.msn.com.
  3. Run a forward lookup on that hostname and check it returns the same IP. Both steps must pass.

Bing has no separate AI token: it controls Copilot use with NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE meta tags.

Test bingbot requests

Questions about bingbot

Is bingbot safe to allow?

bingbot reads public pages; it does not log in or submit forms. Whether to allow it depends on whether you want Microsoft's product to use your pages.

How do I know a request is really bingbot?

Check the request against what Microsoft publishes: Check the IP against Microsoft's published list. Reverse DNS on search.msn.com, confirmed with a forward lookup. The user agent alone proves nothing.

How often does bingbot visit?

It depends on your site; Microsoft doesn't publish a schedule. Referscope shows the real visits.

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