Bingbot

User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36

Mobile variant:

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; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Related Microsoft bots: AdIdxBot (Bing Ads), MSNBot (legacy, mostly retired).

Purpose

The crawler that powers Bing search results, plus the search experiences that license Bing's index (DuckDuckGo, Yahoo!, Ecosia, AOL Search). Also feeds Microsoft Copilot's grounding pipeline.

Network identity

• Reverse-DNS hostname pattern: *.search.msn.com
• Authoritative IP list: published at

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

• Verification protocol identical to Googlebot's: rDNS → fDNS → UA check.

In our audit

Bingbot reached 22/100 e-commerce sites successfully. Where blocked, it was blocked together with the AI bots — Cloudflare's "Block AI Bots" managed rule typically catches Bingbot as well unless explicitly allowlisted. This is a configuration bug at most sites that turn on the rule, since Bing search referrals are non-trivial revenue.

Bingbot was a beneficiary of dynamic rendering at amazon.co.uk (30× content over real Chrome), coupang.com (5×), and shopping.yahoo.co.jp (7×) — same trusted-crawler allowlist as Googlebot.

How to allow / block

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /private/

# Adjust crawl rate (Bingbot honors this; Googlebot does not)
User-agent: bingbot
Crawl-delay: 5

Quirks

• Honors Crawl-delay: in robots.txt (Googlebot does not).
• The JS-rendering tier is sometimes slower than Googlebot's — sites

with heavy client-side dependencies may have a longer indexing lag on Bing than on Google.

• Microsoft's IndexNow protocol (push-based indexing) is the modern

alternative for sites that want fast updates without waiting for Bingbot.

Sources

• Bing Webmasters — Bingbot reference
• Bingbot IP ranges JSON