Bingbot
Microsoft's search crawler - the index behind Bing, Copilot, and Bing's generative answers. Blocking it removes you from all three.
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 and Bing's AI-generated answers draw on. Like Googlebot and AI Overviews, there is no separate Copilot crawler to allow or block - access to Copilot answers rides on Bingbot.
Bingbot honors robots.txt. Blocking it removes your pages from Bing Search, Copilot citations, and every product built on the Bing index (including DuckDuckGo's underlying results in part).
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 generative answers.
User-agent: Bingbot Allow: /
Block Bingbot
Rarely advisable: blocking Bingbot removes you from Bing Search itself, not just AI features.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
Can Bingbot read your page right now?
Test any URL and see exactly what AI crawlers receive.