What is AdIdxBot?
The crawler used by Bing Ads. It crawls ads and follows the websites in them for quality control.
A bot that fits none of the groups above, such as an ad review crawler.
Microsoft says robots.txt controls its crawlers but does not name a separate robots.txt token for AdIdxBot.
AdIdxBot user agent
Microsoft documents these user agents for AdIdxBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Should you block AdIdxBot?
It depends on what it does; read the operator’s page below.
How to block AdIdxBot in robots.txt
Microsoft documents no robots.txt token for AdIdxBot that we could confirm, so we don’t suggest one here. Block it at your server or firewall by user agent instead.
How to verify a request is really AdIdxBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in search.msn.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when AdIdxBot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Microsoft’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.