Microsoft Bing
bingbot
Microsoft's search crawler for Bing.
When you see it: Ordinary Bing indexing, which also feeds Copilot's search results.
How we check it is really Microsoft Bing
- 01
The user agent has to contain bingbot.
- 02
The address is compared against Microsoft Bing's published ranges, which we refetch every six hours.
- 03
If the ranges do not settle it, the address's reverse DNS record is resolved and then resolved forward again, so a faked record cannot pass.
A visit that matches neither is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A range list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence.
What each result means
- verified
- The address matched Microsoft Bing's own published records. This really was them.
- unverified
- We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
- spoofed
- The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.
The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.
No list to check against
Microsoft Bing publishes no machine-readable address file for this crawler, so verification runs through reverse DNS instead — its records resolve under .search.msn.com.
- Operator
- Microsoft Bing
- Token
- bingbot
- Counted as
- Search indexing
- Verification
- IP ranges + reverse DNS
- Runs JavaScript
- No
- Operator docs
- Published
User agent
bingbotMatched as a token, not as a full browser string. Microsoft Bing adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching bingbot keeps working. The same string is what Microsoft Bing names in robots.txt.
One real request
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Microsoft Bing's other crawlers
Microsoft Bing sends 3 crawlers, each with its own token and its own job. They are counted separately for that reason — the tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not, so folding them into one operator row would let indexing look like AI interest.
| Token | Counted as | Verification | What it fetches for |
|---|---|---|---|
bingbotthis page | Indexing | IP ranges + reverse DNS | Microsoft's search crawler for Bing. |
| Copilot | AI answers | IP ranges + reverse DNS | Microsoft Copilot fetching a page to answer with. |
| BingPreview | AI answers | IP ranges + reverse DNS | Builds the preview Copilot shows beside a cited link. |
Your analytics never mentioned bingbot because it cannot see it.
This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.