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# Bingbot

> Bingbot is a search engine crawler run by Microsoft. Microsoft's standard crawler for Bing, which handles most of Bing's crawling.

- Operator: Microsoft
- Kind: Search engine crawler
- robots.txt token: Bingbot
- Follows robots.txt: yes
- Source: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0 (checked 2026-11-05)
- Page: https://invisit.dev/bots/bingbot

## What is Bingbot?

Microsoft's standard crawler for Bing, which handles most of Bing's crawling.

Crawls pages for a classic search index. Blocking it removes you from that search engine.

If robots.txt has a section for Bingbot, Bing ignores the generic * section, so repeat any general rules there.

- [Microsoft’s documentation](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0)

## Bingbot user agent

Microsoft documents these user agents for Bingbot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.

```
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
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
```

## Should you block Bingbot?

Allow it unless you want out of that search engine. Blocking a major search crawler removes your pages from its results.

## How to block Bingbot in robots.txt

Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.

A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your `User-agent: *` rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.

Bing reads the noarchive and nocache robots meta tags to limit how content is shown in Copilot and used to train Microsoft's generative AI models, and Bing Webmaster Tools has a crawl rate control.

```
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /
```

- [Build a robots.txt for AI bots](https://invisit.dev/tools/robots-txt-generator)

## How to verify a request is really Bingbot

Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.

Microsoft publishes the IP ranges Bingbot crawls from. A request that claims to be Bingbot from any other address is not Bingbot.

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.

- [Bingbot IP ranges](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json)

## See when Bingbot 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.

- [Track crawlers with invisit](https://invisit.dev/docs/server/sdk#crawler-reads)

## Common questions

### What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is a search engine crawler run by Microsoft. Microsoft's standard crawler for Bing, which handles most of Bing's crawling.

### Is Bingbot safe to block?

Allow it unless you want out of that search engine. Blocking a major search crawler removes your pages from its results.

### How do I block Bingbot?

Add “User-agent: Bingbot” followed by “Disallow: /” to your robots.txt.