bingbot: Microsoft's Search Crawler
What is bingbot?
bingbot is the Microsoft search crawler that builds the Bing index. bingbot builds the Microsoft index that Copilot answers draw on, so blocking it affects Bing results and Copilot at the same time.
Key facts
- bingbot is operated by Microsoft, and its purpose is classic search: conventional search indexing.
- Microsoft publishes no full user-agent string for bingbot, so Kymo matches the token bingbot observed in real logs.
- The robots.txt token for bingbot is bingbot, and Microsoft documents that bingbot respects that rule.
- bingbot can send a visitor to your site, and bingbot attaches a linked citation when it uses your content.
Specification
| Operator | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Classic searchConventional search indexing. On some engines the same index also feeds AI-generated answer surfaces. |
| Agent kind | CrawlerAutonomous crawler. Appears in your logs under its own user-agent. |
| User agent | Not documented by Microsoft. Kymo matches this agent on the token bingbot, observed in real logs rather than published in operator documentation. |
| robots.txt token | bingbot |
| robots.txt compliance | Documented: respects robots.txt |
| Verification | Reverse DNS, forward confirmed.search.msn.com |
| Sends referral traffic | Yes |
| Attaches a citation | Yes |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | indexing |
| Source | Third-party source, not yet confirmed against operator docshttps://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0 |
| Verified on |
What this looks like in your logs
grep -i 'bingbot' access.log
Microsoft publishes no full user-agent string for bingbot, so the rest of the line varies and only the token bingbot is dependable. Kymo matches on that token, case-insensitively, for the same reason.
What bingbot does not do
bingbot does not guarantee a visit, because a read only becomes a visit if a person clicks the citation that came out of it.
bingbot does not train a model on what it reads, and it has no part in what any other search engine shows.
Microsoft publishes no crawl frequency for bingbot, so any schedule you read elsewhere is somebody's estimate rather than a documented figure.
How Kymo classifies it
Kymo files bingbot under Microsoft as indexing, classified from the HTTP request on the server rather than from anything running in a browser.
A hit from bingbot appears on the Crawlers dashboard and is deliberately left out of the AI Visibility numbers. An index sweep produces no click to miss, so counting it there would inflate the read number and break its relationship to the visitor number beside it.
Seen on our own sites
| Last seen | 15 Sep 2026 |
|---|---|
| Days active, last 30 days | 31 |
| Requests, last 30 days | 54,168 |
Counted by Kymo on kymo.in and remotestack.in, the two sites we run, up to 15 Sep 2026. Two sites is a small sample. Treat these numbers as proof the bot is active now.
Allow it or block it
Blocking bingbot removes you from Bing search results. Microsoft AI surfaces that draw on the Bing index would be affected too, but Kymo could not retrieve Microsoft own crawler documentation to confirm the current grounding relationship, so no specific claim about Copilot is made here.
| Allow it if | Block it if |
|---|---|
| You want to appear in Microsoft search results. | Microsoft sends you no traffic worth the crawl, which is usually a question of language and region. |
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address bingbot only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow bingbot
User-agent: bingbot Allow: /
Block bingbot
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /
Questions
How do I know a request claiming to be bingbot is genuine?
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting address, confirm it ends in .search.msn.com, then run a forward lookup on that name and check it returns the same address. A user-agent string alone proves nothing.
Does blocking bingbot affect my Google ranking?
No. A Google ranking is decided by Googlebot, which is a separate crawler. Each search engine runs its own crawler and its own index, so blocking bingbot removes you from Microsoft results and leaves Google untouched.
Will I see bingbot in Google Analytics?
No. Google Analytics runs a JavaScript tag in a visitor's browser, and bingbot reads your HTML and leaves without running any script. Server-side logging is the only way to record it.
Does bingbot send traffic back to my site?
Yes. bingbot builds an index that Microsoft cites its sources from, and a citation there is a link a person can click. A crawl is still not a visit, so expect the read count to run far ahead of the click count.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
bingbot decides whether you appear in Microsoft results, and a browser tag cannot tell you whether it ever came.
Kymo reads the HTTP request on your server, so a crawler that never runs JavaScript is still recorded. You see which bots reached the site, which pages they took and how often, next to your human traffic.
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