Term
Bingbot
Microsoft Bing's official web crawler, which captures pages for the Bing index and is therefore also indirectly relevant for DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing-based AI answers.
Bingbot — explained in more detail
Bingbot identifies itself in the user agent as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) and respects instructions in robots.txt (User-agent: bingbot) as well as meta robots directives. Verification works via reverse DNS to *.search.msn.com plus forward lookup — Microsoft additionally publishes the official IPs.
Bingbot has rendered JavaScript since 2019 (Microsoft Edge-based), though more selectively than Googlebot. Control happens through Bing Webmaster Tools — crawl rate and URL submission can be configured there.
Example / practical use
If you want visibility in Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or ChatGPT’s web-browse tool, you have to let Bingbot crawl — most of these searches draw on the Bing index. So don’t accidentally block it in robots.txt.
Distinction from related terms
Googlebot and Bingbot are the two large web crawlers — separate indices, separate algorithms. AdIdxBot is Microsoft’s separate crawler for paid-ad targeting; MSNBot was Bingbot’s predecessor (replaced in 2010, should no longer matter today).
Entdecke mehr
301 Redirect
A 301 redirect is an HTTP status code permanently redirecting one URL to another — the standard for URL changes, domain moves and site migrations.
LexikonTechnical SEO — what Google actually has to crawl, render and index
How crawl budget, robots, sitemap, JS rendering, indexing, canonical and Core Web Vitals fit together — the full arc for production sites.
NewsGoogle Search Central Live Toronto 2026 — what Google officially said about the future of search
Information Gain as the new guideline, Google-Extended clarified, AI Mode with 93% zero-click. The key statements from Toronto.