What is Bingbot?
A crawler is a program that visits web pages, reads them and follows their links to find more. Bingbot is Microsoft's. It identifies itself in server logs with a user agent string containing "bingbot," respects the rules in a site's robots.txt and has, since 2022, crawled from a single evergreen version of Microsoft Edge so that it renders modern JavaScript the way a real browser does. What it fetches goes into the index that Bing searches, and that index serves more than Bing itself.
It is not the only Microsoft bot. AdIdxBot checks pages for Bing Ads, BingPreview builds page snapshots, and MicrosoftPreview fetches link previews for Teams and Outlook, each with its own user agent. Knowing which one is in your logs tells you which Microsoft product is looking at you.
Why it matters
Why Bingbot matters
If Bingbot cannot reach a page, that page does not exist on Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or in the web results that Copilot draws on. Sites tuned entirely for Googlebot sometimes block Bingbot by accident, through a firewall rule, a bot-protection service that only whitelists Google, or a robots.txt that names one crawler and forgets the others. The symptom is a site that ranks on Google and is invisible everywhere else.
Crawl behavior also differs. Bingbot historically crawled more aggressively than Googlebot on some sites, which is why Bing offers crawl control settings, and it leans harder on sitemaps and IndexNow to discover new URLs. Knowing what it does is how you shape it.
In practice
How Bingbot works in practice
- 01
Let it in and tell it where to go. Check that robots.txt allows Bingbot where it allows Googlebot, confirm that the firewall or CDN does not challenge it, and verify the crawler is really Bingbot by reverse DNS when you see it in the logs, because spam bots impersonate it. Submit a sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools and enable IndexNow so new pages are pushed rather than discovered.
- 02
Then watch the logs. Server log analysis shows how often Bingbot visits, which sections it spends time in and what status codes it receives. Bing Webmaster Tools' crawl reports show the same from the other side, with errors it hit and the ability to set crawl rate by hour of day if the bot is leaning on your server at the wrong time.
Watch out
What people get wrong about Bingbot
Assuming Googlebot is the only crawler that counts. A site that treats every other bot as noise and blocks it has blocked a search engine. The second mistake is trusting the user agent string. Anything can claim to be Bingbot; Microsoft publishes its IP ranges and a verification tool precisely because scrapers wear the name to get past filters.
Forgetting it renders. Bingbot runs JavaScript now, so a site that hid content from it in the past to save crawl load is probably hiding it from the index, and the fix is to let it see the same page a visitor does.
