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Bingbot (Microsoft): what it is and how to allow or block it

Bingbot is Microsoft's crawler for the Bing search index. Its robots.txt token is Bingbot.

Facts

Operator
Microsoft
Category
Search engine crawler
robots.txt token
Bingbot
Honors robots.txt?
Yes, per Bing. Bing documents robots.txt control for Bingbot in its Webmaster Tools help.
User-agent example
Contains bingbot (the operator documents no full example string)
Official source
Bing Webmaster: Which crawlers does Bing use?
Compared with the source

What it is used for

Crawls pages for Bing. Several assistants and search products use the Bing index. A traditional search engine crawler. AI features of the same company often draw on its index.

What happens if you block it

Blocking Bingbot removes you from the Bing index and the products that build on it.

Bing's help page is rendered with JavaScript, so we could not re-read its text automatically on this date; check it directly.

How to allow or block Bingbot

Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. A group that names the bot overrides a general User-agent: * group.

Allow Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
Block Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Does your site allow Bingbot today? The checker evaluates your robots.txt for this and every other bot.Check my site

What we see on our own sites

In the last 30 days, 28 requests on 1 day identified as Bingbot (latest: ). That is a small sample: read it as an example, not as a measurement of the web.

  • robots.txt: 10
  • Sitemaps: 10
  • Content pages: 5
  • Home page: 3

Counts come from the websites we operate; they hold no IP addresses or URLs, and a user agent is only a claim. See the bot traffic data and the methodology.

Related bots

Other Search engine crawlers

All Search Engine Crawlers · Bot directory · Which bots to allow or block · robots.txt generator · See a page as a bot