Search engine · Microsoft
Bingbot
Bingbot is Microsoft's search engine crawler. It honours robots.txt.
- Operator
- Microsoft
- Purpose
- Search engine
- robots.txt
- Honoured
- Last checked
Documented user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Match on the token Bingbot rather than the whole string, since the version number inside the string can change. A user agent alone can be forged, so verify it as shown below.
robots.txt rules
To block it everywhere:
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly, for example when a broader rule blocks other agents:
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /What blocking it changes
Bing stops crawling the blocked paths. Bing states that it respects content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported controls, including for the AI experiences (Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries) covered by its AI Performance report.
- Bing Webmaster Tools reports citations of your pages in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries in its AI Performance report.
- IndexNow lets you notify Bing of new or changed URLs instead of waiting for a crawl.
How to verify a request is genuine
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP and confirm the name ends in search.msn.com, then a forward lookup on that name that returns the same IP. Bing Webmaster Tools also has a Verify Bingbot tool. Source: Bing: how to verify that Bingbot is Bingbot.
Sources
Microsoft's documentation for Bingbot, read on 15 Oct 2026. Operators change these pages without notice; check before relying on a detail.
Check how your site treats Bingbot
The AI crawler access check reads your robots.txt and fetches a URL as this agent, so you see what a CDN or firewall does as well.
Run the free check All AI crawlers