Search engine crawlers

What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is Microsoft's standard crawler for Bing and handles most of Bing's crawling. Microsoft notes that the user agent is easy to spoof and offers a verification tool.

Last verified 2026-09-30 against the operator's documentation. All bots

Bingbot at a glance

Operator: Microsoft
Type: Search engine crawlers
Purpose: Crawls pages for Bing search.
robots.txt token: bingbot
Example user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
How to verify: Run a reverse DNS lookup and check that the name ends in search.msn.com, then confirm with a forward lookup. Microsoft also publishes Bingbot's IP ranges.
Reverse DNS: search.msn.com
IP ranges: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json
Operator documentation: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0

How often is Bingbot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be Bingbot failed verification.

Measured between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be Bingbot? Check its IP address.

Should you block Bingbot?

Allow it if: you want to appear in Bing search. This is nearly every public site.
Block it if: a section should never appear in Bing. Block the path, not the crawler.
What blocking changes: Your pages drop out of Bing and the services built on Bing's index.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Microsoft documents robots.txt as the way to control Bing's crawlers.

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Bingbot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.