What Bingbot does
Bingbot crawls the web to build Bing's search index. Microsoft Copilot grounds its web answers in that index, and Bing's index also feeds other search products that license it.
Should I allow Bingbot to crawl my site?
Copilot ships inside Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365. Blocking Bingbot removes you from Bing rankings and from the index Copilot cites, and from downstream engines that build on Bing's index.
How to control Bingbot
Target Bingbot in your robots.txt with the Bingbot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /Block Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /Microsoft supports verifying Bingbot traffic against its published IP ranges.
User-agent string
As published by Microsoft. Remember that user-agent strings can be spoofed, so verify suspicious traffic against the operator's published IP ranges.
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/537.36Bingbot FAQ
What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is Bing's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's crawling needs each day. It identifies itself with several user agent strings containing "bingbot/2.0" in desktop and mobile variants, and Bing regularly updates its page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge.
How do I block Bingbot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Bingbot" followed by "Disallow: /" or specific paths; Bing's documentation says robots.txt files can be configured to tell Bing crawlers how to interact with your website. To slow crawling rather than block it, Bing Webmaster Tools offers a Crawl control tool for setting crawl rates by the hour. Because user agent strings can be spoofed, Bing also provides a Verify Bingbot tool to confirm a request really came from Bing.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
