# AdIdxBot: Bing Ads Crawler User Agent and robots.txt

> AdIdxBot is the Bing Ads crawler that checks ads and the pages they link to. User agent strings, robots.txt rules and how to verify requests.

AdIdxBot is the crawler of Bing Ads, the ad platform of Microsoft that is now named Microsoft Advertising. Bing says that AdIdxBot crawls ads and follows the websites from those ads for quality control. If you advertise with Microsoft, keep your landing pages open to it.

## User-agent strings

Bing lists three AdIdxBot user agents on its [crawler page](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0). Like Bingbot, AdIdxBot has desktop and mobile versions.

```
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
```

All three strings contain the token `adidxbot` and link to the Bingbot help page.

## Other Microsoft crawlers

Bing lists AdIdxBot together with its other crawlers:

| Crawler | What Bing uses it for |
|---|---|
| Bingbot | The standard crawler for Bing search. Read the [Bingbot guide](/ai-crawler-bot/bingbot/). |
| AdIdxBot | Checks ads and the sites that the ads link to |
| BingPreview | Makes page snapshots for Bing. Read the [BingPreview guide](/ai-crawler-bot/bingpreview/). |
| MicrosoftPreview | Makes page snapshots for Microsoft products |
| BingVideoPreview | Makes video previews in Bing |

Bing does not describe AdIdxBot as a crawler for the search index or for AI training.

## Control AdIdxBot with robots.txt

Bing says that you can use robots.txt to tell its crawlers how to interact with your site. You can also set the crawl rate by the hour with the Crawl Control tool in Bing Webmaster Tools.

If you want to keep AdIdxBot out of one folder, add a group with its token:

```
User-agent: adidxbot
Disallow: /private/
```

When a crawler finds a group with its own name, it ignores the `User-agent: *` group. [RFC 9309](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309.html) gives this rule, and Bing's robots.txt help says the same for Bingbot. Copy your general rules into the `adidxbot` group if you want them to apply to it too.

A rule for `adidxbot` does not name Bingbot. Bing search crawling continues under the rules for Bingbot. Do not block AdIdxBot on pages that your ads link to. Bing uses it to check those pages.

## Verify AdIdxBot requests

Bing says that anyone can fake a user agent string. To make sure that a request comes from a Bing crawler, use the [Verify Bingbot tool](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/verify-bingbot) or a DNS check.

The [Bing verification help](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26) gives these steps:

1. Do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address from your log.
2. Make sure that the name ends with `search.msn.com`.
3. Do a forward DNS lookup on that name.
4. Make sure that the result is the same IP address.

On Linux or macOS, you can do both lookups with the `host` command:

```
host
host
```

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[View the canonical page](https://aichatwatch.com/ai-crawler-bot/adidxbot/) · [Browse llms.txt](https://aichatwatch.com/llms.txt)