What is bingbot?
bingbot is Microsoft's standard web crawler that handles most of Bing's crawling needs each day, indexing web content for Bing search results using both desktop and mobile variants. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when bingbot visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36 |
| Operated By | Microsoft |
| Source | Official Website |
| Identity |
Verified
Verified Identification
Requests claiming to be this agent can be authenticated using its published verification method. |
| Triggered By | Automated crawl |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Possibly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is bingbot Visiting My Website?
bingbot is adding new or changed pages to its search index. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or direct submission.
Should I Block bingbot?
No, unless you want to remove your pages from that search engine. bingbot supplies its index, so blocking it can eliminate your visibility and organic traffic there. Nearly every website should allow this category. For context, 2% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for bingbot.
How Do I Block bingbot Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block bingbot from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all search engine crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: bingbot # https://knownagents.com/agents/bingbot
Disallow: /Insights for bingbot
As of October 31, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From bingbot?
bingbot follows an algorithmic schedule shaped by your site's popularity, update cadence, and domain authority. It generally spreads requests across recurring crawl passes, throttles itself to limit server load, and respects crawl rules more reliably than most other bots.
Does bingbot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
bingbot is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step if you want to block it. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether bingbot respects it.
Is bingbot Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. bingbot is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking bingbot Affect AI Search or Citations?
Blocking bingbot can remove your pages from the search engine it supplies. That may also affect AI products that rely on the same index, but it does not directly control unrelated AI search services.
Does bingbot Access Private Content?
No special access. bingbot can reach only content available to anonymous visitors and does not sign in. Make sure sensitive content is not public by mistake.
How Can I Verify a Request From bingbot?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from bingbot and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using bingbot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "bingbot". Look for recurring passes that revisit changed pages and discover new ones. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be bingbot.
How Is bingbot Different From Other Microsoft Agents?
Microsoft operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- AzureAI-SearchBot: AzureAI-SearchBot is an AI search crawler operated by Microsoft that indexes web content to support Azure AI services and improve search capabilities across Microsoft's A…
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- Bing Preview: Bing Preview is a fetcher operated by Microsoft.
- BingPreview: BingPreview generates page snapshots and previews for Bing, creating visual representations of web pages for search results using both desktop and mobile variants.
- Microsoft Preview: Microsoft Preview is a fetcher operated by Microsoft.