Bing Ads
Bing Ads is an intelligence-gathering crawler operated by Microsoft. It collects competitive, marketing, or threat-intel data from public web pages, usually on behalf of a buyer who wants visibility into a market or competitor set.
Volume is moderate but persistent. The crawler is interested in pricing pages, product pages, ad creatives, or whatever else its customers are tracking.
Whether to allow it is a strategy call. Some businesses want to be seen by their competitors; others would rather hide.
See Bing Ads on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Heavy on demand
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Varies
Microsoft runs 24 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Link Unfurler
11Search Engine
4Brand Intelligence
2- adidxbot
- Bing AdsYou are here
AI Search Index
2Agentic Browser
2DevOps & Monitoring
1Generic Crawler
1SEO Crawler
1Should I let Bing Ads through?
In most cases, yes. Whether to be seen by competitors is a strategy call. Rate-limit if volume gets noisy. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Bing Ads affect my Google rankings?
No. Bing Ads is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from Bing Ads?
Look at the User-Agent header in your access logs and match it against the strings listed above. Worth knowing that the User-Agent is easy to fake, so this check tells you "the traffic claims to be Bing Ads", not "the traffic is genuinely Bing Ads". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Microsoft to publish IP ranges.
Why is a third-party tool crawling my site?
Someone, possibly a competitor running a backlink audit, possibly your own team, set up a job in Microsoft. The crawler runs on their schedule. Blocking it only blocks their visibility into your site, it doesn't break anything user-facing.
How is Bing Ads different from Microsoft's other bots?
Microsoft splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Microsoft family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control Bing Ads?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.