# Bingbot: Bing Crawler User Agent, robots.txt and Copilot

> Bingbot crawls for Bing search and Copilot answers. User agent strings, DNS and IP verification, robots.txt rules, and noarchive and nocache AI controls.

Bingbot is the main crawler of Microsoft Bing. Pages that it crawls appear in Bing search, and they can appear as cited sources in Microsoft Copilot answers. Bing's crawler list has no separate AI crawler to block. To limit AI use of your pages, let Bingbot crawl and use the `noarchive` or `nocache` robots meta tags.

## User agent strings

Bing lists its crawlers on [Overview of Bing crawlers](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0). Bingbot uses these formats:

```
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
```

```
Mozilla/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)
```

`W.X.Y.Z` stands for the version of Microsoft Edge that Bing uses to render pages. Bing updates it to the latest stable Edge version. The robots.txt token is `Bingbot`.

## Other Bing crawlers

| Crawler | What it does |
|---|---|
| [AdIdxBot](/ai-crawler-bot/adidxbot/) | Crawls ads in Bing Ads and the sites that the ads link to, for quality control. |
| [BingPreview](/ai-crawler-bot/bingpreview/) | Generates page snapshots for Bing. |
| MicrosoftPreview | Generates page snapshots for Microsoft products. |
| BingVideoPreview | Makes video previews in Bing. |

## Verify Bingbot requests

Bing says that user agent strings are easy to fake. To make sure that a request came from Bing, follow the steps in [How to verify Bingbot](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26):

1. Do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address. The host name must end in `search.msn.com`.
2. Do a forward DNS lookup on that host name. Make sure that it returns the same IP address.

You can also enter the IP address in the [Verify Bingbot](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/verify-bingbot) tool. Another method is to compare the IP address with the list in [bingbot.json](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json). Bing can change this list at any time, so download it again each day.

## robots.txt rules for Bingbot

If you want to block Bingbot from the whole site, use this group:

```
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /
```

Bing does not index pages that Bingbot cannot crawl. Bing documents these details in [How to create a robots.txt file](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-create-a-robots-txt-file-cb7c31ec):

- If Bingbot finds a group for itself, it ignores the `User-agent: *` group. Copy the general rules into the Bingbot group too.
- Bingbot reads `Crawl-delay` in its own group, for example `Crawl-delay: 1`. The Crawl Control tool in Bing Webmaster Tools also sets the crawl rate by hour.
- Bing keeps robots.txt in its cache for at least a few hours. A change can take some hours to have an effect.
- Bing does not index a page that it cannot crawl. To keep a page out of the index, allow the crawl and add `noindex`.

## Control how Copilot uses your pages

Bing controls AI use with robots meta tags, not with robots.txt. Bing lists the effects in [Robots meta tags and attributes that Bing supports](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/robots-meta-tags-and-attributes-that-bing-supports-5198d240):

| Tag | What Bing documents |
|---|---|
| `noindex` | The page is not indexed. Bing does not use the content to train Microsoft generative AI foundation models. |
| `noarchive` | No cached copy. Chat and Copilot do not link to the page. Bing does not use the content for training. |
| `nocache` | No cached copy. Chat and Copilot show only the URL, title and snippet. Training uses only URLs, titles and snippets. |

If a page has both `nocache` and `noarchive`, Bing treats it as `nocache`. To apply a tag to Bing only, use `name="bingbot"`:

```html

```

You can send the same values in the `X-Robots-Tag` HTTP header.

To see which of your pages Copilot cites, open the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. It counts citations in Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner AI services. For the assistant itself, see the [Microsoft Copilot guide](/ai-search-engine/microsoft-copilot/).

---

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