BingPreview: Bing Page Snapshot Crawler and User Agent
BingPreview makes page snapshots for Bing. Its current user agent carries the bingbot token. How to verify it and limit previews with meta tags.
BingPreview is a Microsoft crawler that generates page snapshots for Bing. In Bing’s current crawler list, its user agent strings carry the bingbot/2.0 token, the same token as Bingbot. Bing does not document a separate robots.txt token for BingPreview. To limit the description and preview thumbnail that Bing shows for a page, use robots meta tags.
User agent strings
Bing lists BingPreview in Overview of Bing crawlers. BingPreview has a desktop and a mobile variant:
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/537.36Mozilla/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 Microsoft Edge version that Bing uses to render pages. These strings are the same as two of the Bingbot strings. In your logs, you cannot tell BingPreview from Bingbot by the user agent alone.
Older strings with the token BingPreview/1.0b still appear in bot lists, for example in Cloudflare Radar. Bing’s current list does not show this token.
Verify the requests
For all its crawlers, Bing points to the Bingbot verification methods. Use the Verify Bingbot tool, or follow the steps in How to verify Bingbot:
- Do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address. The host name must end in
search.msn.com. - Do a forward DNS lookup on that host name. Make sure that it returns the same IP address.
Block or limit BingPreview
Bing does not say which robots.txt group BingPreview reads. A User-agent: BingPreview group has no documented effect. A User-agent: Bingbot group with Disallow also keeps your pages out of Bing search.
If you want to limit the description or the preview, use the robots meta tags from Robots meta tags and attributes that Bing supports:
| Tag | Effect |
|---|---|
nosnippet |
No description and no preview thumbnail for the page. |
max-image-preview:none |
No image preview. |
max-snippet:0 |
No text snippet. |
data-nosnippet attribute on an element |
No description or thumbnail from that part of the page. |
To apply a tag to Bing only, use name="bingbot":
<meta name="bingbot" content="nosnippet">Related Microsoft crawlers
| Crawler | What it does |
|---|---|
| MicrosoftPreview | Generates page snapshots for Microsoft products. Its strings contain MicrosoftPreview/2.0. |
| BingVideoPreview | Makes video previews in Bing. Its strings contain BingVideoPreview/1.0. |
| AdIdxBot | Crawls ads in Bing Ads and the sites that the ads link to. |