Bingbot — Microsoft's ai search indexer

Bingbot renders JavaScript and behaves as a classic search crawler with adaptive crawl scheduling.

Content in Bing's index can be used in Copilot's grounded answers with citations. Microsoft has pointed publishers to NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE controls to constrain Copilot's use of their content while remaining in Bing Search results.

Bingbot identifies itself with the following user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Never trust the user-agent string alone. Scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to inherit their access. Microsoft supports reverse-DNS verification (hosts under search.msn.com) and offers a bot-verification tool for checking suspect IPs.

Note that most AI crawlers and fetchers, Bingbot included, do not execute JavaScript — so this traffic is invisible to GA4 and every script-based analytics tool. Server logs, CDN analytics, or a dedicated bot-analytics layer are the only places you will see it. For the full picture of measuring AI-driven visits, see our guide on how to track AI traffic.

To refuse Bingbot access to your entire site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /

To restrict it from specific sections only (for example, premium content) while leaving the rest open:

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /premium/
Disallow: /members/

The case for blocking: Bing's search share makes outright blocking cheaper than blocking Google, but Copilot's distribution through Windows and Microsoft 365 is significant reach you'd give up with it.

The case for allowing or monetizing: Same as Google: the return is search and citation visibility. Copilot citations link out, and Bing remains the second-largest general index most AI products quietly depend on.