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Bingbot

Bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler used for indexing websites for Bing Search.
Bingbot
Search Engine Crawler

What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is a search engine crawler. Bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler used for indexing websites for Bing Search.

Bingbot powers a search engine, and search indexes increasingly feed AI answers and overviews alongside classic results. The pages it can crawl are the pages eligible to rank and to be pulled into AI-generated summaries, so allowing it protects both your SEO and your AI search visibility.

Like any automated client, Bingbot consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle Bingbot

Most sites keep Bingbot allowed, because blocking it can remove your pages from the AI answers and search results it powers. Only disallow it if you specifically want to opt out of that surface.

To control Bingbot, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Bingbot generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • After publishing a new comparison page, a marketer checks whether Bingbot has fetched it so the content can appear in AI answers.
  • An SEO lead keeps Bingbot allowed in robots.txt to preserve visibility in AI-powered search.

Frequently asked questions about Bingbot

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

Bingbot is a search engine crawler; its operator is identified in its user-agent string and public documentation.

Be the brand AI recommends

Monitor your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Get actionable insights and create content that gets cited by AI search engines.

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