Bingbot
Bingbot is a search-engine crawler operated by Microsoft. Its job is to find, fetch, and index web pages so they can be returned in organic search results.
Traffic is regular and bounded by your robots.txt. Allowing it is generally how your site stays discoverable through the corresponding search engine, blocking it almost always reduces visibility there.
For most sites, search-engine crawlers are still the largest source of bot traffic and the largest source of human visitors that follow.
See Bingbot on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Known UA examples
example 1
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
Continuous
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
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
4- BingbotYou are here
- MSN
- msnbot
- msnbot-media
AI Search Index
2Agentic Browser
2DevOps & Monitoring
1Generic Crawler
1SEO Crawler
1Share of AI bot traffic
6.2%
↓ 24% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
1.1%
↑ 57% vs 12 mo ago
Top page categories crawled
Search Engines as a category, share of all bot traffic
66%
↓ 6% vs 12 mo ago
Sum of every search engine we have public stats on. Compare to Bingbot's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
41 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~24 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Source: Bing Webmaster Tools, Cloudflare Radar verified bots, Cloudflare 'crawl-to-click gap' blog (Aug 2025)
Should I let Bingbot through?
In most cases, yes. Blocking traditional search crawlers reduces organic-search visibility. Allowing is the default for almost all sites. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Bingbot affect my Google rankings?
Only on Microsoft Bingbot feeds. Each search engine runs its own crawler, so blocking Bingbot only removes you from that one index. Your visibility on Google, Bing, or anything else is untouched.
How do I confirm a request is really from Bingbot?
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 Bingbot", not "the traffic is genuinely Bingbot". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for Microsoft to publish IP ranges.
What happens to my traffic if I block Bingbot?
Your pages drop out of Microsoft's index, which means losing the organic share you get from that engine. Not catastrophic if Microsoft is a minor player, much more painful if it's a meaningful source of your traffic. Check your analytics for Microsoft's actual referral share before deciding.
How is Bingbot 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 Bingbot?
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.