Bingbot
Microsoft's search engine.
- Operator
- Microsoft
- Type
- Search engine
- In the user agent
bingbot- robots.txt token
bingbot- Follows robots.txt
- says it follows robots.txt
- Official documentation
- not found; identified by its observed user agent
- Checked on
- 2026-11-04
What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is Microsoft's search engine. It indexes pages for a search engine, whose results also feed AI answers.
The operator's description: Bing search crawler; its index also grounds Copilot answers.
How do I block or allow Bingbot?
With robots.txt, using the token bingbot. Microsoft says it follows robots.txt. To block the whole site:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /To allow it, use Allow instead of Disallow. Before blocking, weigh what it brings: without it, the assistant cannot find your pages to cite or recommend them.
How do I see whether Bingbot visits my site?
In your server or CDN access logs, look for bingbot in the user agent. Google Analytics does not show these visits: agents do not run its JavaScript.
Anyone can copy the name in a user agent, so counting log lines is not enough. Knocklog reads your site's traffic on any host, confirms who is who, and shows how often Bingbot came, which pages it read and what that brought you.
How do I know it is really Bingbot?
Microsoft publishes Bingbot's IP addresses at https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. A visit that claims to be Bingbot from outside those ranges is spoofed.
The IP's reverse DNS, confirmed forward and back, must end in .search.msn.com.
Knocklog runs this check on every visit and separates the genuine agent from impostors.
Does Bingbot visit your site?
See in seconds how your site treats AI agents. Then connect your traffic to learn who really came.