Bots
What is bingbot, and should you allow it?
bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler for the Bing search index. Allow it on any page you want found in Bing; disallowing it removes you from Bing. To check a visit is real, match the address against Bing's bingbot.json range file, or run a reverse DNS lookup to search.msn.com followed by a forward lookup.
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541bingbot requests to attensira.com
to 207 pages · Microsoft #5 of 7 operators
| Operator | Share of requests | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| Meta | 131,105 | |
| OpenAI | 7,536 | |
| ByteDance | 3,505 | |
| Perplexity | 621 | |
| Microsoft (this page) | 541 | |
| Google Search | 189 | |
| Anthropic | 104 |
User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP · · n=143,601 requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block bingbot in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves bingbot today.
# Microsoft's search crawler. Disallowing it removes you# from Bing.User-agent: bingbotAllow: /User-agent: BingbotAllow: /Disallow: /api/We name bingbot and allow it everywhere except /api/, the same as every AI and search crawler we allow by name.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs bingbot, and what is it for?
Microsoft runs it, and we file it under search indexing. Builds a search engine's index. Blocking a primary crawler stops that engine, and features built on its index such as Google's AI Overviews, from reading your pages; a media or regional variant scopes only its own results.
From Microsoft’s documentation, read . Why a training fetch and a search fetch are different decisions: the AI crawler guide.
Why does bingbot belong in an AI crawler directory?
Because it arrives in the same logs as the AI agents, and separating it from the AI agents around it is most of what a crawler report is for. Microsoft publishes two user agents for bingbot, desktop and mobile, both carrying bingbot/2.0 and the documentation URL +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm2. It describes the rendering engine behind them as evergreen, kept up to date with the most recent stable Microsoft Edge1.
Its documented job is building Bing's index: search indexing, the kind of fetch that can end with your URL in front of a reader. It is widely said that the Bing index feeds various AI assistants. The Microsoft sources cited here do not say that, so this page does not either. A claim about which AI product consumes a crawler's output changes what people allow, and it should come from the operator or not at all.
What does bingbot look like on a real site?
On attensira.com, Attensira's own AI traffic measurement recorded 541 bingbot requests across 207 pages in the 30 days to 4 October 2026. That is nearly three times Googlebot's 189 requests in the same window, and far below OpenAI's 7,536. Search crawlers are not the loudest visitors on a site that AI agents read heavily, but bingbot reached more of our pages than Googlebot did.
These are user agents as sent, from one site, so they say nothing general about Bing. They do show why "bot traffic" as a single number misleads: three operators with three different jobs, an order of magnitude apart.
The study figures above give the other half. Across the top 10,000 Tranco domains, almost nobody blocks bingbot, and far more sites name it with an explicit allow than with a block.
How do I verify that a visit really came from bingbot?
A user-agent header is free text, so a log line naming bingbot is a claim until you check it.
Look up the visiting IP, confirm the hostname ends in one of the suffixes in the record, then look that hostname up and confirm it returns the same IP, or match the IP against the published ranges.
Bing publishes bingbot.json; fetched on 2026-10-05 it carried a creationTime of 2024-01-03 and 28 IPv4 prefixes, so check its date before you trust it. Microsoft also documents a DNS check: reverse-resolve the address to a name ending in search.msn.com, then forward-resolve that name to the same address. Run both steps; a reverse record alone can be faked.
Should you allow bingbot if you are blocking AI crawlers?
Yes. The robots.txt block above is deliberately minimal: allow bingbot. Disallowing it removes you from Bing, and the documentation cited here offers no separate training or citation token like Google-Extended or Applebot-Extended. That absence is the useful fact. With Google you can be indexed and not trained on. With Bing, the cited documentation gives you no such lever, so a bingbot rule is a search rule and nothing else.
The usual structural trap applies. A User-agent: * Disallow: / reaches every crawler that has no group of its own, and bingbot is one of them unless you name it. If you wrote a wildcard to keep AI crawlers out, bingbot went with them. The fix is a named bingbot group: under the robots.txt standard a crawler follows the wildcard only when no group names it, so a bingbot group with Allow: / exempts it in full. Microsoft documents bingbot reading its own group when one exists and the wildcard group otherwise4. Remember that it then ignores everything else under *, so repeat any path rules you still want.
Does Bing publish a bingbot IP list?
Yes, now. Bing publishes bingbot.json at www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. Fetched on 5 October 2026, it carried a creationTime of 3 January 2024 and 28 IPv4 prefixes5. That reverses Microsoft's 2012 position that Bing published no list, which is still repeated in older guides. Match against the file itself, not a copy, and check its creationTime: a file nearly two years old is a reason to keep the DNS round trip as a second check.
Published range file
- bingbot
- bingbot.json
- Googlebot
- common-crawlers.json
Reverse DNS
- bingbot
search.msn.com- Googlebot
googlebot.com
Separate training token
- bingbot
- None in the cited docs
- Googlebot
- Google-Extended
- Reverse DNS ends in
- *.search.msn.com
- IP range file
- bingbot.json
ResearcherTranscribed from Microsoft documentation · Agents filed beside bingbot
How often do sites block bingbot?
Measured by us, not reported by Microsoft: the robots.txt of the 10,000 highest-ranked domains on the Tranco list for 2026-09-01. A domain that never mentions the token wrote no policy for it.
The method and every row, with the CSV.
- disallow bingbot at the root
- 2.2%
- 179 of 8,036 domains
- allow it by name
- 5.3%
- 426 domains
- never mention it
- 92.5%
- 7,431 domains
How should you match bingbot in logs?
Microsoft prints Chrome/W.X.Y.Z as a literal placeholder for the Edge version in use, and bingbot/2.0 is a version too2. Match the bare token bingbot, case-insensitively, as a whole word. It is lowercase in Microsoft's own strings, so a case-sensitive filter copied from an example that wrote "Bingbot" matches nothing.
What can Attensira show you about bingbot?
AI traffic, on Growth and Business, counts crawler fetches per operator and declared purpose, measured at the edge; it is where the numbers above came from. It reports user agents as sent and leaves the reverse DNS round trip to you. The answers are read separately: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews every day on every plan, and Gemini on Growth and above. See crawler logs and the robots.txt generator.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http:/Should I allow bingbot in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
Your firewall vendor offers a bingbot allowlist built from IP ranges and you are about to enable it.
Check that it is fed from Bing's own bingbot.json, not a vendor's copy, and keep the reverse-DNS check as a fallback.
Bing publishes the file itself, so a list built from it is the operator's word rather than a reconstruction. A copied list goes stale silently, and the file's own creationTime tells you how old the source is. When an address is not in the file, the DNS round trip Microsoft documents is still the way to settle it.
A reverse DNS lookup on a suspicious address returns a hostname ending in search.msn.com and you are ready to accept it.
Run the forward lookup before you accept it.
Microsoft's documented procedure has two steps, and the second is the one that matters. A reverse DNS record can be set by whoever controls the address; only a forward lookup that resolves the returned name back to the same address proves the name and the address agree. One step alone is a check that a determined impersonator passes.
You are auditing which crawlers to allow for AI visibility and someone asks whether bingbot belongs on the list.
Keep it as a search-engine decision. Do not record a claim about which AI products consume the Bing index.
The Microsoft documentation cited on this page describes bingbot as Bing's crawler and names no AI product as a consumer. Writing down an AI justification the operator has not published is how an unsourced assumption becomes a line in next year's policy, and the honest entry is the one that says what Microsoft says.
What else do people ask?
What is bingbot?
Should I allow bingbot?
Does bingbot respect robots.txt?
Where do these facts come from?
5 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.
Microsoft documents bingbot as the Bing crawler, announcing its user-agent strings and describing its web page rendering engine as evergreen, kept up to date with the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge.
blogs.bing.com · retrieved
“regularly updating our web page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge”
Microsoft published bingbot's desktop user agent as "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36", alongside a mobile form carrying the same bingbot/2.0 token, with W.X.Y.Z standing for the Edge version in use.
blogs.bing.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Microsoft documents verifying bingbot by performing a reverse DNS lookup on the source address to confirm it resolves to a name ending in search.msn.com, then performing a forward DNS lookup on that name to confirm it resolves back to the same address.
blogs.bing.com · retrieved
“Perform a reverse DNS lookup using the IP address from the logs to verify that it resolves to a name that end with search.msn.com”
Microsoft documents that bingbot fetches and analyses the robots.txt file at the root of each host, honours a group addressed to bingbot or msnbot when one exists and the wildcard group otherwise, and keeps the directives in memory for a few hours before fetching the file again.
blogs.bing.com · retrieved
“it keeps your directives in memory for a few hours”
Bing publishes the addresses bingbot crawls from as a JSON range file at www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. Fetched on 2026-10-05, it carried a creationTime of 2024-01-03T10:00:00 and 28 IPv4 prefixes. This supersedes Microsoft's 2012 statement that Bing did not publish such a list.
bing.com · retrieved
“"creationTime": "2024-01-03T10:00:00.121331"”
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