What is MSN?
MSNBot was Microsoft's crawler for the former MSN Search engine. It visited web pages so they could be considered for MSN's search index. Microsoft later replaced MSN Search and this crawler line with Bing, making msnbot a legacy identity rather than the normal name for current Microsoft search crawling.
The supplied signatures preserve what older traffic looked like: msnbot/1.1 ( http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) and msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm). Both contain the stable msnbot token and point to an old MSN Search hostname. They do not use the modern browser-shaped Bingbot string.
Cloudflare's operator link now leads to Microsoft's overview of Bing crawlers. That page identifies Bingbot as Microsoft's current standard crawler. A site that wants present-day Bing indexing should manage bingbot separately; allowing or denying msnbot is not a substitute for a Bingbot policy.
A modern request carrying one of the old strings needs verification before it is trusted. User-agent headers can be copied, and the source record supplies no Web Bot Auth directory or verified IP flag for MSNBot. Its requested paths and network origin are more informative than the historical label alone.
Robots.txt behavior is not confirmed by the Promptwatch metadata, and Cloudflare's bot directory marks followsRobotsTxt as false. The stable token makes a legacy rule possible, but there is no supplied current Microsoft commitment that MSNBot will honor it. Use a server, CDN, or firewall rule when the request must be denied.
MSNBot's documented purpose predates today's generative search products. Nothing in the record connects it to Microsoft Copilot, an AI answer index, or model training. Blocking the legacy identity has no documented AI opt-out effect; current Microsoft search and AI controls must be evaluated under their current crawler names.
