Copilot
Also known as Microsoft Bing Copilot
4 min read · updated 2026-09-09
Definition
Copilot is Microsoft Bing's crawler for answering questions. Microsoft Copilot fetching a page to answer with. Someone asked Copilot a question and it opened your page.
For the reference card — Copilot in the crawler directory.
What Copilot 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 Copilot is counted as an AI answer, 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
Usually a single request for one URL, arriving while somebody waits — no sweep of the site, no repeated visits, and often no robots.txt fetch first. If you see one hit on one page and nothing else, that is the normal shape. A burst of ten to fifty pages in a few minutes is also normal and means an agent was researching rather than answering a single question.
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
Microsoft Bing's assistant can no longer open your page to answer a question about it. People will still be told about you from whatever the model already knows, but without the current page, a link, or a citation — which is usually the opposite of what a site owner wants.
This is the crawler that brings people back. When an assistant fetches a page to answer with, it usually shows the source and links to it, so the visit can turn into a reader. Blocking it removes you from the answer without removing the question.
The argument for blocking is the same one that applies to any zero-click surface: if a model can answer from your page, some readers get what they came for without visiting. That matters most if your pages are the product — reference material, calculators, documentation — and least if they exist to sell something the model cannot deliver.
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:
BingPreview — ai assistant. Builds the preview Copilot shows beside a cited link. bingbot — search indexing. Microsoft's search crawler for Bing.
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.
Questions
- Is Copilot in my logs really Microsoft Bing?
- Not necessarily, and that is why it is worth checking. Any script can send Copilot 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 Copilot apart from Microsoft Bing's other crawlers?
- By the token, and only by the token. Microsoft Bing also sends BingPreview, bingbot, 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 Copilot 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 Copilot counted as AI answers and not something else?
- Because that is the job this particular crawler does. Microsoft Bing runs more than one — BingPreview, bingbot — 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 Copilot 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 Copilot 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
See whether Copilot is reaching your pages.
AI crawlers take your HTML and leave without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads them server-side, checks each address against what the operator publishes, and shows you which pages were fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.