Bingbot
Microsoft's search crawler and the index behind Copilot. There is no separate Copilot crawler.
Reference reviewed by Sona
| Operator | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Powers | Bing Search, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing generative answers |
| Purpose | Search & answers |
| User-agent token | Bingbot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes |
Bingbot is the crawler behind Bing Search, and the index it builds is what Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in. As with Googlebot and AI Overviews, there is no separate Copilot crawler to allow or block - if Bingbot has not indexed a page, it generally cannot appear in Copilot's responses.
Bing's reach extends well past bing.com, which is what makes this token quietly high-stakes. The Bing index supplies results to Copilot across Windows and Microsoft 365, to Bing's own generative answers, and in part to DuckDuckGo's traditional results. A single Disallow here propagates further than most people expect.
One practical advantage over Googlebot: Bingbot honors Crawl-delay. If crawl volume is the actual problem, you have a supported throttle rather than a binary choice, and Bing Webmaster Tools additionally offers crawl-rate control. Between the two, blocking Bingbot for load reasons is almost never necessary.
Microsoft runs several bots in the same family - AdIdxBot for ads, plus BingPreview and MicrosoftPreview for rendering - and provides a Verify Bingbot tool alongside published IP ranges. Reverse DNS for legitimate traffic resolves under search.msn.com.
How Bingbot behaves
- Honors Crawl-delay, giving you a supported throttle that Googlebot does not offer.
- Its user-agent ends with a Chrome/Safari fragment, which trips naive browser-detection log parsing.
- Crawl rate can also be tuned in Bing Webmaster Tools independently of robots.txt.
- Its index feeds Copilot, Bing generative answers, and in part DuckDuckGo's traditional results.
Full user-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36
Allow Bingbot
You stay in Bing Search and remain eligible to be cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's generative answers - a reach that includes Windows and Microsoft 365.
User-agent: Bingbot Allow: /
Block Bingbot
Rarely advisable: this removes you from Bing Search itself, plus Copilot and partner results. If load is the concern, use Crawl-delay instead.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
How to verify Bingbot
Reverse DNS + published IP ranges
Bing documents forward-confirmed reverse DNS: reverse-resolve the request IP, confirm the hostname ends in search.msn.com, then forward-resolve that hostname and check it returns the same IP. Microsoft also publishes Bingbot's ranges as JSON and offers a Verify Bingbot tool in Bing Webmaster Tools for one-off checks. Bingbot's user-agent ends with a Chrome fragment, so partial-string matching on "Chrome" will misclassify it as human traffic.
Documented reverse-DNS suffixes: .search.msn.com
Commonly confused with Bingbot
The same structure at Google: one search crawler whose index feeds the AI answer surface, with no separate AI crawler. The difference is that Bingbot honors Crawl-delay and Googlebot ignores it.
DuckDuckGo uses Bing results for traditional search but runs DuckAssistBot separately for its AI answers. Blocking Bingbot does not block DuckAssistBot, or the reverse.
Bingbot FAQs
Is there a separate crawler for Microsoft Copilot?
No. Copilot grounds its answers in the Bing index that Bingbot builds. If Bingbot cannot index a page, that page generally cannot appear in Copilot's responses - there is no Copilot-specific token to allow or block.
Can I slow Bingbot down instead of blocking it?
Yes. Bingbot honors the Crawl-delay directive, and Bing Webmaster Tools offers separate crawl-rate control. Between the two, blocking Bingbot purely for server load is almost never necessary.
What else does blocking Bingbot affect?
More than bing.com. The Bing index feeds Copilot across Windows and Microsoft 365, Bing's generative answers, and in part DuckDuckGo's traditional results, so one Disallow propagates across several surfaces.
How do I verify Bingbot?
Use forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the hostname should end in search.msn.com and forward-resolve back to the same IP. Microsoft also publishes JSON IP ranges and a Verify Bingbot tool in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Can Bingbot read your page right now?
Test any URL and see exactly what AI crawlers receive.