Overview
Bing Preview is a web scraper from Microsoft used for public web data collection, page extraction, content monitoring, and third-party crawler activity.
Its primary user-agent pattern is BingPreview; related patterns include Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b; a representative HTTP user-agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b.
Bing Preview is Verified from current authoritative identity documentation reviewed on 2026-08-07. The identity type is Official Documented.
Bing Preview is marked as respecting robots.txt directives for crawler access control.
Bing Preview should be reviewed against site policy, source evidence, crawl rate, and requested paths before a permanent allow or block rule is created.
Identity
- User-Agent Pattern
-
BingPreview - Aliases
- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b
- HTTP Agent Examples
-
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b - Robots Token
- BingPreview
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Match `BingPreview` to the current operator documentation and corroborate the request with operator-controlled verification signals where available; User-Agent strings alone can be spoofed.
Classification
- Type
- Scraper
- Kind
- Preview
- Family
- Microsoft
- Purpose
- Scraping
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Bing Preview is used for public web data collection, page extraction, content monitoring, and third-party crawler activity.
- Detection Notes
- Bing Preview traffic is primarily detected by the `BingPreview` user-agent pattern; related patterns include `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b`; a representative HTTP user-agent is `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b`. Compare source IPs, reverse DNS, request paths, and crawl cadence with Microsoft infrastructure before trusting the traffic.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- Bing Preview has medium spoofing risk because the user-agent can be copied, even when the bot has strong source or documentation support.
- Risk
- Neutral
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
-
User-agent: BingPreview Disallow: /
Relationships
- Operator
- Microsoft Checked 2026-08-07
Relationships without an Evidence link are normalized from the canonical directory record. They should not be interpreted as independent proof of physical presence or request origin.