Bingbot

What user agent does Bingbot use?

Microsoft publishes these user agent strings for Bingbot.

The first is the desktop agent and the second the mobile one, with W.X.Y.Z where the Microsoft Edge version goes. The last is the older string, which Bing said in 2022 it would phase out. BingPreview, which takes page snapshots, sends the same strings.

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
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

How do I block Bingbot?

Bing says Bingbot honours robots.txt, including Crawl-delay. Bing has no separate robots.txt token for AI: its noarchive meta tag keeps a page out of Copilot answers and out of Microsoft’s AI model training.

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

How do I check that a Bingbot visit is real?

Anyone can put a crawler’s name in a user agent, so the name alone proves nothing.

Bing publishes Bingbot’s IP addresses and says to refresh your copy daily. A reverse DNS lookup of a genuine request’s IP address gives a host name ending in search.msn.com, and a forward lookup of that name returns the same address. Bing Webmaster Tools’ Site Scan, which a site owner starts, uses the older user agent from other addresses, so a scan of your own can fail the check.

Spreelytics runs this check for you. Every crawl that claims to be Bingbot is compared with the IP ranges Microsoft publishes, refreshed every 12 hours, and one from outside them counts as spoofed.

How do I see Bingbot visits on my site?

Your server’s access logs record the user agent of each request, so you can search them for “Bingbot”.

Or add the Spreelytics server middleware, @spreelytics/ai-crawl. It recognises Bingbot by its user agent and counts each visit on the Bots page under Indexing, apart from your visitor numbers.

Sources: www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0, www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26, www.bing.com/webmasters/help/robots-meta-tags-and-attributes-that-bing-supports-5198d240