bingbot
Bingbot is the crawler Microsoft uses to build the Bing search index. Blocking it removes your pages from Bing search results. Microsoft publishes its IP list and a DNS method for confirming that a request claiming to be Bingbot really comes from Bing, which lets a firewall allow it safely.
What it does
Bingbot crawls the web for Bing search. Its user agent contains the token bingbot; Microsoft moved it to an evergreen format in 2022, where the Chrome version tracks the current Microsoft Edge release, and announced that the older short string would be phased out.
User agent strings can be spoofed, so Microsoft recommends confirming the source of a request rather than trusting the bingbot token. Blocking Bingbot means Bing cannot crawl your pages for its search index.
In our 2026-11 study, 3.3% of popular sites with a robots.txt blocked it. →
robots.txt token
bingbot
User-agent string
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/537.36How to allow it
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /How to block it
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /How to verify real visits
Microsoft recommends a two-step DNS check: run a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP and confirm the hostname ends in search.msn.com, then run a forward lookup on that hostname and confirm it returns the same IP. Microsoft also publishes a list of Bingbot IP addresses and offers a Verify Bingbot tool in Bing Webmaster Tools.