Bingbot
Bingbot is Microsoft's main crawler. Its index feeds the Bing search engine and also Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365. On top of that, other AI search engines (including part of ChatGPT's web search) have historically relied on Bing's index, so being well-crawled by Bingbot multiplies your visibility across several assistants at once.
- User-agent
BingbotMozilla/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- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Yes
- Official documentation
- https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block Bingbot?
No. Blocking it removes you from Bing and reduces your presence in Copilot and other AI assistants that draw on Bing's index. It's one of the bots with the best visibility-to-crawl-cost ratio out there.
Does Bingbot affect my visibility in Copilot?
Yes. Copilot builds its search-backed answers on top of Bing's index. If Bingbot can't crawl your site, Copilot is unlikely to cite you as a source.
How do I know if Bingbot visits my site?
Search for "bingbot" in your server logs, and sign up for free at Bing Webmaster Tools to see crawl and indexing stats, just like you would with Google Search Console.