AI crawlers / bingbot
bingbot
Microsoft · Bing Search + Copilot · Discovery / citation crawler
Microsoft's Bing search crawler. Microsoft Copilot is grounded in Bing web results, so Bingbot access affects both Bing and Copilot.
At a glance
Affects live AI answersYes
Affects search inclusionYes
Used for model trainingNo
robots.txt tokenbingbot
Source confidenceobserved · verified 2026-09-04
Allow it, this crawler decides whether you can be cited in this engine’s answers.
What bingbot is
Bingbot is Microsoft's crawler for Bing Search; it crawls and indexes pages for the Bing index. Its user-agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)."
Microsoft Copilot is grounded in Bing web search, so being indexed by Bingbot is what makes a page reachable for Copilot's cited answers. We label the Copilot linkage "observed" because Microsoft documents Bingbot for Search, while the Copilot grounding relationship is stated in Microsoft's product messaging rather than a single crawler spec.
Blocking Bingbot removes you from Bing Search and, by extension, from the results Copilot draws on.
Controlling bingbot in robots.txt
Add the matching group to the robots.txt at your site root.
Allow bingbot:
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /Block bingbot:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /Check what your live site actually allows with the Robots.txt + AI-Bot Tester.
Source
Verified on 2026-09-04 against Microsoft, Bingbot. Confidence: observed, behavior reported by the vendor but not fully specified in a single crawler document.
The next question
Your page is AI-ready. But does AI actually cite you?
Being crawlable is step one. The AI Visibility Checker shows whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini name and cite your brand, and who they name instead.
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