Key point. Bingbot is Microsoft's search engine crawler for Bing search. Blocking it removes your pages from that search engine, including AI answers built on its index. It follows robots.txt.
Bingbot at a glance
These are the facts our registry holds for Bingbot, checked against Microsoft's documentation on October 14, 2026.
| Vendor | Microsoft |
| Used by | Bing search |
| Purpose | Web search |
| Type | User agent |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes; source: vendor's documentation, as recorded in our AI crawler check |
| Vendor documentation | Microsoft crawler page, checked October 14, 2026 |
| Published IP ranges | www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json |
What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is Microsoft's search engine crawler for Bing search. Blocking it removes your pages from that search engine, including AI answers built on its index. Our registry notes: Microsoft Copilot retrieves from the Bing search service.
Does Bingbot follow robots.txt?
Yes, Bingbot follows robots.txt: our registry records this from the vendor's documentation, as recorded in our AI crawler check.
A robots.txt rule records your request. It does not prove a crawler honours it, and firewall or CDN bot settings can refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows, so check those too.
How do I block Bingbot in robots.txt?
Add a group that names Bingbot and disallows the whole site:
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /To keep it out of one folder only, disallow that path instead, for example Disallow: /private/.
How do I allow Bingbot?
Bingbot is allowed by default: if no group names it and no User-agent: * rule blocks it, it may read every page. A crawler obeys the most specific group that names it and falls back to User-agent: * only when no group names it (RFC 9309), so if a catch-all rule blocks crawlers, add a group for it:
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /Want the exact block for every AI crawler at once? Our robots.txt generator for AI crawlers writes it for each choice.
How can I tell if a request really comes from Bingbot?
Match the request's IP address against Microsoft's published list, because user agents can be faked: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json.
How often do startup websites block Bingbot?
Our AI Crawler Access Report read the robots.txt files of 600 sampled startup websites on October 7, 2026. This is its row for Bingbot, across the 569 sites whose answer it could read:
| Crawler | Type | Blocked on at least one path | Blocked on all six paths | Named in the file |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bingbot | Web search (reference) | 3 of 569 sites (0.5%; 95% interval 0.2% to 1.5%) | 0 of 569 sites (0%; 95% interval 0% to 0.7%) | 50 of 569 sites (8.8%; 95% interval 6.7% to 11%) |
“Blocked” means the file disallows the crawler on at least one of six common paths (/, /pricing, /blog/, /docs/, /about, /product).
The report's headline figure, for the three AI search crawlers it tracked: “3 of 569 startup websites (0.5%; 95% interval 0.2% to 1.5%) block at least one AI search crawler (Elementera AI Crawler Access Report, October 2026).”
The figures describe that sample of Y Combinator-backed software companies on the day we fetched it. The method, the intervals and the full table are in the AI Crawler Access Report.
What the AI Crawler Access Report adds about Bingbot:
0 of 569 sites (0%; 95% interval 0% to 0.7%) close the whole site to crawlers, Googlebot and Bingbot included.
Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI features draw on the Bing and Google indexes, so for them Bingbot and Googlebot are the crawlers that matter.
How do I check whether my robots.txt blocks Bingbot?
Paste your robots.txt into our free checker and it shows, crawler by crawler, whether Bingbot may read the path you choose. Nothing you paste leaves the page.