Copilot
Microsoft Copilot's browsing agent for AI-assisted answers.
What is Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot uses a set of crawlers including CopilotBot, BingPreview, and MicrosoftPreview to access web content when generating AI-assisted answers. Copilot is deeply integrated into Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Bing, giving it access to hundreds of millions of users.
Copilot's crawlers don't always identify themselves with a unique user-agent — they often piggyback on Bingbot infrastructure. This makes detection challenging without behavioral analysis. The BingPreview and MicrosoftPreview agents generate page snapshots used in Copilot's visual responses.
As Microsoft pushes Copilot across its entire product suite, the volume and importance of Copilot-related crawling continues to grow. Content that is well-structured and easily parseable tends to be cited more frequently in Copilot responses.
User-Agent Strings
These are the known user-agent patterns used by Copilot. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.
robots.txt example:
User-agent: CopilotBot Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
How to Manage Copilot
Copilot often uses Bing infrastructure — allow Bingbot to ensure Copilot access.
Use Switch behavioral analysis to detect Copilot browsing that lacks unique UA strings.
Serve markdown-formatted content for cleaner AI summarization.
Monitor BingPreview visits as indicators of Copilot content usage.
Start managing Copilot today
Switch detects, tracks, and lets you build custom journeys for Copilot and 35+ other AI agents and crawlers. Set up in five minutes.
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