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AdIdxBot

An AdIdxBot visit usually starts with a Bing Ads workflow rather than an organic search crawl.
Bing AdsAdIdxBot
AdvertisingSearch Engine Crawler

What is AdIdxBot?

An AdIdxBot visit usually starts with a Bing Ads workflow rather than an organic search crawl. Microsoft uses it to inspect ads and follow their destination websites for quality control, so the requested URL is often a landing page associated with an ad.

The catalog records desktop and iPhone variants. Both identify as adidxbot/2.0 and point to Bing's bot information URL. The same quality-control work can therefore arrive with either a conventional desktop header or a mobile Safari-style header.

If AdIdxBot cannot fetch a destination, the stated check cannot inspect what the ad leads to. Allowing it lets Bing Ads review those landing pages, but the record assigns it no organic-search indexing role. A request also reveals nothing about whether an ad passed review.

No AI search or model-training purpose is recorded for AdIdxBot. Its visits should not be presented as a route into generated answers. Robots.txt evidence is mixed: this bot marks compliance as true, while Cloudflare's bot directory marks it false. The record has no verified IP identity or request-signature directory, so the user-agent string is not proof that Microsoft sent the request.

Relevant for AI search

Is AdIdxBot relevant for AI search?

Yes. AdIdxBot collects pages for an AI product, so what it can crawl influences how AI systems describe your brand.

AdIdxBot feeds a search index that also powers that engine's AI answer features and overviews. One crawl can serve a classic results page and a generated summary, so blocking it costs you both the rankings you would expect and a growing share of AI answers built on the same index.

How to handle AdIdxBot

Sites that run Bing Ads should normally leave public ad destinations available to AdIdxBot. Pages that should never be used as landing pages can state a site-wide preference with:

User-agent: AdIdxBot
Disallow: /

The compliance records conflict, so treat this directive as a crawl preference and check subsequent access logs. If the crawler must be stopped, enforce the restriction at the application or edge. Do not grant access to a protected route solely because a request contains adidxbot/2.0.

Examples

  • A paid-search team sees the iPhone variant fetch a responsive campaign landing page and checks that the mobile response is usable.
  • A security team finds an AdIdxBot header on an account route and keeps the route behind authentication because the header is not a verified identity.

Frequently asked questions about AdIdxBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Bing Ads uses AdIdxBot for quality control of ads and the destination websites reached from those ads.

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