| Operator | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Bing search indexing (also feeds Copilot and many AI search products) |
| robots.txt token | bingbot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes. |
| If you block it | Pages drop out of Bing and the products built on its index. Cloudflare “Block” for training also covers Bingbot. |
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/140.0.7339.80 Safari/537.36Version numbers inside user-agents change over time. Match on the token (bingbot), never on the full string.
robots.txt examples
Block Bingbot
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /Allow Bingbot, block a folder
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /A group for a specific crawler replaces the User-agent: * group for that crawler — rules are not combined. Repeat any rules from * that should still apply.
How to verify Bingbot
Reverse DNS must end in search.msn.com and resolve forward to the same IP.
The user-agent alone proves nothing — it is the first thing scrapers copy. See how to verify crawlers.
Is Bingbot blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt may allow Bingbot while your CDN or firewall refuses it. Test the real response with the Googlebot checker.
Official documentation: www.bing.com