What Is Bingbot?
Bingbot is a web crawler used by Microsoft’s Bing search engine to discover and index content from websites across the internet. It visits webpages, analyzes their content, and helps determine how those pages appear in Bing’s search results.
Bingbot powers the Bing search engine. It is to Bing what the Googlebot is to Google and the YandexBot is to Yandex. Like many search engines, Bingbot also has other crawlers besides Bingbot. They include:
- BingPreview: Used to generate page previews in Bing search results
- AdIdxBot: Used by Bing Ads to crawl landing pages for ad quality and relevance
- MicrosoftPreview: Used to create previews for Microsoft products like Teams and Office
In this article, we’ll cover:
Importance of Bingbot
Bingbot determines how your website is indexed and ranked on the Bing search results page. Just like any other search engine crawler, it scans your webpages, follows links, and gathers content to include on Bing search results pages.
If Bingbot cannot crawl your site, then you will struggle to rank on Bing. This will lead to lost traffic and missed opportunities from users who rely on Bing and its partner platforms like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, which wholly or partly rely on Bing for their own results pages.
Aside from getting you traffic from non-Google users, Bing itself is heavily intertwined with Microsoft’s products. So, optimizing your site for Bing will typically open you up to new users and an entirely new audience.
Bingbot’s User-Agent Strings
You can think of a user-agent string as the name of the bot or browser accessing your site. This lets you identify the bots and browsers visiting your site. Bingbot uses the following user agent strings:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, wie Gecko; kompatibel; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/WXYZ Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (kompatibel; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) WXYZ Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, wie Gecko) Chrome/WXYZ Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Bingbot uses the most stable version of Microsoft Edge for its webpage rendering engine. So, in the actual user string that crawls a site, W.X.Y.Z will be replaced with the version number of the latest Edge browser used by Bingbot.
So, an actual Bingbot user agent string would look something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/136.0.7103.92 Safari/537.36
How to Verify Bingbot
Malicious bots can disguise themselves as trustworthy search engine crawlers by using the exact same user-agent string as that search engine crawler. This tactic is called user-agent spoofing and is a widespread issue on the web.
Like any other crawler, Bingbot’s user-agent string can be spoofed. So, the fact that a bot uses the exact user-agent string as Bingbot does not make it Bingbot.
You can confirm whether a bot that claims to be Bingbot is really Bingbot by entering its IP address into Bing’s Verify Bingbot Tool. Once done, solve the CAPTCHA and click senden.
Notiz: You will find the bot’s IP address in your server log. If you use a log analyzer or security plugin, it may also contain the bot’s IP address.
If the bot is really Bingbot, Bing will return the success message, as shown below.
Otherwise, the tool will return a message indicating the bot is not Bingbot.
Bingbot vs Googlebot
Bingbot and Googlebot are among the most common search engine crawler bots on the web.
Both bots perform the same functions. They visit webpages, analyze content, and send data back to their search engines to determine how pages appear in search results. The main differences lie in how frequently they crawl, how they interpret specific directives (like robots.txt rules), and the search ecosystems they serve.
Googlebot tends to crawl more frequently and is prioritized by most bloggers due to Google’s dominant market share. However, Bingbot remains important, especially since it powers other search services like Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and multiple Microsoft products.
Overall, Bingbot and Googlebot are not usually in competition. So, make sure to optimize your site for both crawler bots to ensure you receive visibility across multiple search platforms and ecosystems.
How to Control How Bingbot Crawls Your Site
Bloggers sometimes want to control how Bingbot crawls their site. This could happen because they want to preserve server resources or prevent indexing of incomplete or private content. In such cases, you can either block Bingbot from crawling your site or control the rate at which it crawls your site.
1 Reduce Bingbot’s Crawl Rate
You can reduce Bingbot’s crawl rate if you feel it is crawling your site more than you want it to. To do that, head to the Bing Webmaster-Tools und auswählen Configuration → Crawl Control.
Then set your desired crawl rate. Once done, click Änderungen speichern.
2 Prevent Bingbot From Crawling Specific Pages
You can prevent Bingbot from indexing specific posts and pages by setting the post or page to keinindex. You can refer to this guide on setting your posts and pages to noindex using Rank Math. Once done, Rank Math will add the noindex meta tag to your content, as shown below.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
3 Prevent Bingbot From Crawling Your Directories
If you do not want Bingbot to crawl every URL in the directory at https://yourdomain.com/paid-course/, then you can add the rule below to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /paid-course/
If you do not want Bingbot to crawl your entire site, then add this rule to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /