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MSN

MSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine.
Microsoftmsnbot
Search Engine Crawler

What is MSN?

MSN is Microsoft's search engine crawler. MSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine.

MSN 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, MSN 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 MSN

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

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

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Microsoft does not publish a robots.txt commitment for MSN, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

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

Related bots

Bing Preview

BingPreview generates page snapshots for Bing. Note that BingPreview has desktop and mobile variants.

Preview

AdIdxBot

AdIdxBot is the crawler used by Bing Ads for quality control of ads and their destination websites. It has multiple user agent variants including desktop, iPhone, and Windows Phone versions.

Search Engine Crawler

Adsense

The AdSense crawler visits participating sites in order to provide them with relevant ads.

Search Engine Crawler

adsnaver

Naver's ad crawler that periodically visits registered ad landing pages to collect on-page content for effective ad matching and ranking. It ignores robots.txt for URLs registered in the ad system.

Search Engine Crawler

Algolia

The Algolia Crawler extracts content from your site and makes it searchable.

Search Engine Crawler

Frequently asked questions about MSN

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

MSN is operated by Microsoft. It functions as Microsoft's search engine crawler.

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