Bingbot
Microsoft Bing's search crawler, also powering Copilot AI answers.
What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is Microsoft's primary web crawler for Bing Search. It indexes content that appears in Bing search results and, increasingly, powers AI-generated answers in Microsoft Copilot. Bing's market share has grown significantly with the integration of AI features.
The crawler operates from verified IP ranges published at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. Bingbot respects robots.txt and the crawl-delay directive. It also sends specialized variants like BingPreview for generating page snapshots and AdIdxBot for advertising quality checks.
With Copilot now using Bing-indexed content to generate AI answers, Bingbot has become more important than ever. Content that Bingbot cannot access will not appear in Copilot responses, making it a critical crawler for AI visibility beyond just traditional search.
User-Agent Strings
These are the known user-agent patterns used by Bingbot. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.
robots.txt example:
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
Detection on the Switch Network
2
Sessions detected
2
Total events
95%
Avg confidence
First detected: 2/28/2026 · Last seen: 3/9/2026
How to Manage Bingbot
Allow Bingbot to ensure visibility in both Bing Search and Microsoft Copilot.
Use Switch to differentiate between genuine Bingbot and spoofed requests.
Consider serving enriched content for Copilot consumption via markdown journeys.
Monitor Bingbot-related crawlers like BingPreview and AdIdxBot separately.
Start managing Bingbot today
Switch detects, tracks, and lets you build custom journeys for Bingbot and 35+ other AI agents and crawlers. Set up in five minutes.
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