bingbot: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What bingbot is
bingbot builds the retrieval index that Microsoft answers from. This is the category that decides whether you can be cited right now: when someone asks a question and the assistant goes looking for sources, it searches an index this crawler built. Blocking it removes you from those answers.
Operator: Microsoft
robots.txt token: bingbot
User-agent on the wire: not published by the operator
Category: Live retrieval / search index
What blocking it actually costs
Copilot answers are grounded in the Bing index. Blocking bingbot removes you from Copilot as well as from Bing.
How to block bingbot
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow bingbot
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
robots.txt is not the only thing that can block it
A permissive robots.txt does not mean bingbot can reach you. WAF rules, Cloudflare's bot-management settings, rate limits and country blocks all sit in front of robots.txt and answer first. A site whose robots.txt welcomes bingbot and whose edge returns 403 to it is blocked in every way that matters — and nothing in robots.txt will tell you so.
This is the gap the AI Crawler Access Checker was built to close: it reads robots.txt and sends a real request carrying the crawler's user-agent, so you see what the crawler sees.
Official documentation
Microsoft documents bingbot at https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0.
Common questions
- What user-agent does bingbot send?
Microsoft does not publish an exact user-agent string for bingbot. Match on the
bingbottoken in robots.txt rather than on a full string you found elsewhere.- How do I block bingbot?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /The group must name
bingboton its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one — under RFC 9309 the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking bingbot cost me?
Copilot answers are grounded in the Bing index. Blocking bingbot removes you from Copilot as well as from Bing.
- Can I tell a real bingbot request from a fake one?
Not reliably. Microsoft does not publish verified IP ranges for bingbot, so the user-agent string is the only signal, and anyone can send it. Treat robots.txt as a statement of policy rather than as enforcement.
Is bingbot blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it — a firewall rule can block bingbot while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free