Bingbot: what it is and how to allow or block it
Bing’s search crawler. Bing’s index also supplies Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries.
Last checked 2026-10-08
- Company
- Microsoft
- Used for
- Bing, including Microsoft Copilot answers
- Job
- Search engine crawler that also feeds AI
- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- Name in robots.txt
- Bingbot
What Bingbot does
Microsoft calls Bingbot “our standard crawler,” handling most of Bing’s crawling. Microsoft’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools tracks how your pages are cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and “select partner AI integrations.”
Microsoft’s list of its crawlers has no separate AI-only bot, so letting Bingbot in is how you stay available to Bing and the AI answers built on it.
Should you allow it?
Allow it. You can also see how often Microsoft’s AI cites you in Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report.
What blocking it changes: Your pages drop out of Bing, and with them out of Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries.
Allow or block Bingbot in robots.txt
Bing says robots.txt files “can be configured to tell Bing crawlers how to interact with your website,” and Bing Webmaster Tools includes a robots.txt tester. In the user-agent string above, Microsoft replaces W.X.Y.Z with the Microsoft Edge version Bingbot currently uses; there is also an older short form and a mobile form.
To allow it
User-agent: Bingbot Allow: /
To block it
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
robots.txt lets every bot in by default, so you only need the allow lines if another rule in your file would otherwise block it. Our robots.txt guide explains how rules for different bots combine.
How it appears in your server logs
Microsoft publishes this as the bot’s user-agent string, the label it sends with every visit:
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
How to check a visit is really Bingbot
Microsoft publishes the IP ranges Bingbot uses, and runs a “Verify Bingbot” tool that checks a single address.
Our guide to server log checks shows where to find these visits on common hosting setups.
Source: Microsoft’s list of Bing crawlers, checked 2026-10-08. Bots and their rules change often, so check the company’s own page before making a decision that matters.
To see how often Microsoft’s AI cites your pages, read our guide to the Bing AI Performance report.
Other Microsoft bots
See which AI bots your site lets in
The free AI readiness check reads your robots.txt and reports which of the main AI crawlers are allowed or blocked, along with everything else that decides whether AI can understand your site.
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