# bingbot > bingbot is Microsoft Bing's crawler for search indexing. Microsoft's search crawler for Bing. Ordinary Bing indexing, which also feeds Copilot's search results. **Category:** AI crawlers **Also known as:** Microsoft Bing bingbot **Updated:** 2026-09-09 **Source:** https://truestat.io/glossary/microsoft-bingbot --- ## What bingbot is Microsoft's crawling feeds two products that look separate to a visitor but share one index: Bing search and Copilot's answers. DuckDuckGo's results also draw on Bing, so a decision here reaches further than the one brand. On this site bingbot is counted as indexing, which is the row it appears in on your dashboard. The category matters because it decides which number moves when this crawler visits, and the four are reported separately for exactly that reason. ## What its traffic looks like A steady crawl over time rather than a burst: robots.txt first, then pages in waves, revisiting the ones that change often. Volume tracks how large and how frequently updated your site is. A sudden increase usually follows a sitemap change or a burst of new pages, and a sudden stop is worth investigating — it often means a robots rule or a server error rather than a decision by the operator. ## How it is verified Checked as ip ranges + reverse dns. The user agent has to carry the token, and then the address is compared against what Microsoft Bing publishes — refetched every six hours, so a newly announced range is picked up without a deploy. A request that matches neither is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery: a published list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence. Only a reverse DNS record resolving to somebody else produces a spoofed verdict, which is proof rather than the absence of it. ## If you block it You disappear from Bing, and from the Copilot answers that draw on Bing's index. DuckDuckGo also leans on Bing's results, so the cost reaches further than the one search engine. Treat this as a search-engine decision rather than an AI one, because that is what it is. The question is whether the people you want are looking through this engine, and your own analytics answer it better than any general advice can. It is worth checking what you actually lose before writing the rule. Blocking an index crawler is one of the few changes here with an effect that compounds quietly: nothing breaks on the day, and traffic simply stops arriving over the following weeks. ## How it differs from Microsoft Bing's other crawlers Microsoft Bing sends 3 crawlers and gives each its own token, so they can be allowed and refused separately. The tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not: Copilot — ai assistant. Microsoft Copilot fetching a page to answer with. BingPreview — ai assistant. Builds the preview Copilot shows beside a cited link. Confusing two of these is the most common mistake with this operator, and it is expensive in one direction: a rule meant for the training crawler that lands on the search crawler removes you from results without stopping any training. ## One real request ```text Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) ``` ## Questions ### Is bingbot in my logs really Microsoft Bing? Not necessarily, and that is why it is worth checking. Any script can send bingbot as its user agent. Microsoft Bing publishes the addresses its crawler uses, so the claim can be tested against them — a request from outside those ranges is recorded as unverified rather than accepted. ### How do I tell bingbot apart from Microsoft Bing's other crawlers? By the token, and only by the token. Microsoft Bing also sends Copilot, BingPreview, and the strings differ by a few characters while the jobs differ completely — one may be answering somebody's question while another collects training material. Match on the exact token rather than on the operator's name appearing anywhere in the header, or the four end up counted as one. ### Does bingbot run JavaScript? No. It requests the HTML and leaves. That is why a browser-based analytics tag never records these visits: the tag is JavaScript, and nothing runs it. Seeing this crawler at all requires reading it server-side. ### Why is bingbot counted as Indexing and not something else? Because that is the job this particular crawler does. Microsoft Bing runs more than one — Copilot, BingPreview — and they are counted separately because the decisions about them are separate. Filing them together under one operator name would let ordinary indexing look like AI interest, which is the single most misleading thing an AI traffic report can do. ### Why does bingbot not show up in Google Analytics? Google Analytics runs in the browser. This crawler never opens a browser — it requests the HTML, reads it, and leaves, so the tracking script is never executed and no event is ever sent. Every browser-based analytics tool has the same blind spot, which is why crawler traffic has to be read from the server side to be seen at all. ### What happens if a bingbot visit cannot be verified? It is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A published address list can be incomplete or behind — an operator can start using a range before it appears in the file — so a miss is not evidence of anyone pretending. A visit is only marked as spoofed when the address's own reverse DNS record resolves to somebody else, which is proof rather than absence of proof. ## Related - https://truestat.io/glossary/microsoft-copilot - https://truestat.io/glossary/microsoft-bingpreview - https://truestat.io/glossary/fcrdns - https://truestat.io/glossary/spoofed-crawler --- From the TrueStat glossary — https://truestat.io/glossary. Privacy-first web analytics that also shows you which AI assistants are reading your site.