MSNBot
MSNBot was Microsoft's official crawler for indexing the web in Bing and its predecessor MSN Search. In October 2010, Microsoft retired it and replaced it with bingbot, which is the active crawler today. Any msnbot visits you see in your server logs are most likely residual or from legacy systems still using the old token. Having your site properly indexed in Bing still matters because Bing powers services like Microsoft Copilot, which answers user questions using web content.
- User-agent
msnbotmsnbot/2.0b- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Yes
- Official documentation
- https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2010/06/28/bing-crawler-bingbot-on-the-horizon
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: msnbot
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block msnbot?
There is not much point in doing so, since msnbot was retired in 2010 and is no longer Microsoft's active crawler. That role now belongs to bingbot. If you already have robots.txt rules targeting msnbot, bingbot honours them for backwards compatibility, so no changes are needed.
Does msnbot affect my visibility in AI answers?
Only in a residual, indirect way. It was the crawler that built the Bing index, and Bing powers services like Microsoft Copilot. Today that job is done by bingbot, so what actually matters for your current visibility is making sure bingbot can access your site without issues.
How do I know if msnbot is visiting my site?
Search for "msnbot" in your server logs or your hosting provider's dashboard. If you find it, the traffic is almost certainly residual, as Microsoft replaced msnbot with bingbot over a decade ago. What is worth checking instead is whether bingbot is crawling your site correctly.