Bingbot

AI search indexer

Microsoft's search crawler. Its index powers Bing search and grounds Microsoft Copilot answers. Microsoft offers a nocache/noarchive meta-tag control for limiting Copilot's use of content rather than a separate crawler token.

OperatorMicrosoft
TypeAI search indexer
Respects robots.txtYes (documented)
DocumentationOfficial operator documentation

Bingbot user-agent string

This is how Bingbot identifies itself in your server logs:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Safari/537.36

How to block Bingbot in robots.txt

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:

Block Bingbot

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Explicitly allow Bingbot

User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

What blocking changes: Blocking Bingbot removes you from Bing search results and from Copilot's grounded, cited answers. Use the noarchive/nocache controls to limit AI use while staying in the search index.

Want to decide for all AI bots at once? Use the AI robots.txt generator.

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