Overview
MicrosoftPreview is Microsoft’s documented crawler for generating page snapshots used by Microsoft products.
Microsoft documents desktop and mobile variants of MicrosoftPreview/2.0. User-Agent strings are spoofable, so authenticate claimed Microsoft traffic with Microsoft’s available verification methods rather than the header alone.
Identity
- User-Agent Pattern
-
MicrosoftPreview - Aliases
- MicrosoftPreview/
- HTTP Agent Examples
-
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36 - Robots Token
- MicrosoftPreview
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Verify Microsoft Preview by matching `MicrosoftPreview` to Microsoft evidence, then checking reverse DNS, source-network ownership, signed request data, or published crawler documentation when available.
Classification
- Type
- Preview
- Kind
- Preview
- Family
- Microsoft
- Purpose
- Page snapshot preview
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Generating page snapshots and previews for Microsoft products.
- Detection Notes
- Microsoft Preview traffic is primarily detected by the `MicrosoftPreview` user-agent pattern; related patterns include `MicrosoftPreview/`; a representative HTTP user-agent is `Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview)`. Compare source IPs, reverse DNS, request paths, and crawl cadence with Microsoft infrastructure before trusting the traffic.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- Microsoft 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: MicrosoftPreview 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.