AI crawler · Microsoft · Search engine
Bingbot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
Bingbot is Microsoft's search crawler. Bing's main crawler. Bing search and Microsoft Copilot answers draw on its index. In our 13 October 2026 study, 53 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (2.3%) disallow Bingbot. Part of the AI crawler list.
What Bingbot does
Operator: Microsoft. Job: Search engine. Obeys robots.txt.
“Robots.txt files can be configured to tell Bing crawlers how to interact with your website.”
Bingbot user agent
robots.txt token: Bingbot (matched case-insensitively).
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Bing writes W.X.Y.Z where the Chrome version goes.
robots.txt: allow or block Bingbot
Allow
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /Block
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /Affects AI answers and citations. Blocking it removes your pages from Microsoft's search index, and from the AI answers Microsoft builds on that index.
Once a group names Bingbot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block Bingbot
Disallow Bingbot in robots.txt
2.3%
53 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 53 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (2.3%) disallow Bingbot.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way Bingbot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for Bingbot
- Finds the group Bingbot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is Bingbot?+
Bingbot is Microsoft's search crawler. Bing's main crawler. Bing search and Microsoft Copilot answers draw on its index.
What is Bingbot's user agent?+
Microsoft documents it as: Mozilla/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. Match on the token Bingbot, since version numbers change.
How do I block Bingbot?+
Add "User-agent: Bingbot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Microsoft.
Does blocking Bingbot affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it removes your pages from Microsoft's search index, and from the AI answers Microsoft builds on that index.
How many websites block Bingbot?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 53 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (2.3%) disallow Bingbot.