Bingbot
Microsoft's search crawler. Powers Bing, DuckDuckGo's bulk results, Yahoo!, Ecosia, and Microsoft Copilot's web grounding.
Specs
| Vendor | Microsoft |
| Category | SEARCH |
| robots.txt token | bingbot |
| Renders JavaScript | RENDERS JS |
| Honors robots.txt | yes |
| Reverse-DNS pattern | *.search.msn.com |
| IP-range source | https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json |
User-Agent string
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/537.36Considerations
- Renders JavaScript using Edge / Chromium since 2019.
- Honors Crawl-delay: in robots.txt (Googlebot does not).
- Frequently caught in 'Block AI Bots' WAF presets by accident — auditing the rule's UA list is the fix.
robots.txt recipe
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /
Crawl-delay: 5Sources: Bing Webmasters · Bingbot reference · Bingbot IP ranges