Overview
BingBot is a search crawler from Microsoft used for search indexing, URL discovery, page rendering, result freshness, and search-quality checks.
Its primary user-agent pattern is bingbot; related patterns include bingbot/; a representative HTTP user-agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Mozilla/5.3 (compatible; bingbot/2.1; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm).
BingBot is verified with High confidence. The identity type is Verified Bot, and the evidence basis is official operator documentation.
BingBot is marked as respecting robots.txt directives for crawler access control.
BingBot can usually be allowed after confirming the source and monitoring request volume.
Identity
- User-Agent Pattern
-
bingbot - Aliases
- bingbot/
- HTTP Agent Examples
-
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 - Robots Token
- bingbot
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Verify BingBot by matching `bingbot` to Microsoft evidence, then checking reverse DNS, source-network ownership, signed request data, or published crawler documentation when available.
Classification
- Type
- Search
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Microsoft
- Purpose
- Indexing
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- BingBot is used for search indexing, URL discovery, page rendering, result freshness, and search-quality checks.
- Detection Notes
- BingBot traffic is primarily detected by the `bingbot` user-agent pattern; related patterns include `bingbot/`; a representative HTTP user-agent is `Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Mozilla/5.3 (compatible; bingbot/2.1; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)`. Compare source IPs, reverse DNS, request paths, and crawl cadence with Microsoft infrastructure before trusting the traffic.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- BingBot has medium spoofing risk because the user-agent can be copied, even when the bot has strong source or documentation support.
- Risk
- Safe
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
-
User-agent: bingbot 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.