Bingbot
Bing's standard crawler. According to Microsoft's webmaster guidelines, the index it builds serves Bing search, Copilot and grounding results delivered through APIs.
| Operator | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search — Bing search and Microsoft Copilot |
| robots.txt token | Bingbot |
| 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 |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the publisher |
| Official IP ranges | https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json — 28 ranges, list dated 2024-01-03 |
| Reverse DNS | search.msn.com |
| Official documentation | https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0 |
Live activity of Bingbot
Over the last 30 days, 8 visits from Bingbot to iabig.com: 8 IP-verified, 0 spoofed, 0 unverifiable. Last seen: 2026-10-25.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 14:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What Bingbot does
Bingbot is Bing's standard crawler and handles most of its crawling. Bing's webmaster guidelines say that Bing search, Copilot and grounding results served through APIs all rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation.
What Microsoft states:
- robots.txt tells Bing's crawlers how to interact with your site, and Bing gives an example of a
Crawl-delayrule aimed at Bingbot. Bing Webmaster Tools also has a crawl control setting. - robots.txt controls crawl access, not indexing. To keep a URL out of Bing, Copilot and grounding results, use
noindex, which means Bingbot must still be able to fetch the page. noarchivekeeps content out of Copilot responses and grounding results, and out of training for Microsoft's generative AI foundation models.nocachelimits both Copilot and training to the URL, title and snippet.
Bing's guidelines list blocking Bingbot in robots.txt as something to avoid. Microsoft has no separate robots.txt token for AI; Copilot usage is controlled through meta tags instead.
The user-agent string is evergreen: W.X.Y.Z is replaced with the Microsoft Edge version in use. To check a request, run a reverse DNS lookup (hostnames ending in search.msn.com) followed by a forward lookup, use the Verify Bingbot tool, or match the address against bingbot.json.
Block or allow Bingbot
Blocking Bingbot stops Bing from crawling your pages, which affects both Bing search and Copilot. The noarchive and nocache tags let you limit Copilot's use of your content without blocking crawling.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /A group naming Bingbot replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Verify a Bingbot visit
Anyone can write “Bingbot” in a User-Agent. Paste the IP address and User-Agent from your logs into the IP verifier to know whether the visit is genuine.