What is bingbot and should you block it?

bingbot is Microsoft's search crawler. Blocking it takes you out of Bing.

What bingbot does

bingbot is Microsoft's search crawler. It feeds Bing and Copilot, and ChatGPT search draws on Bing as a search provider, so bingbot is a second door into ChatGPT answers next to OAI-SearchBot.

On robots.txt: bingbot respects robots.txt.

What blocking it costs

Blocking bingbot removes you from Bing and Copilot, and closes one of the two doors into ChatGPT search. Bing also runs IndexNow, which is the cheapest way to get a new page noticed, and none of that works for a site bingbot cannot read.

How many of the top 5,000 sites block it

In my September 2026 census of the Tranco top 5,000, 2,778 sites returned a robots.txt. 118 of them block bingbot (4.2%), which makes it the 19th most-blocked of the 20 crawlers I checked. 254 files mention it by name; the rest of the mentions either allow it explicitly or restrict only part of the site.

Googlebot is blocked by 95 sites (3.4%) and bingbot by 118 (4.2%). Those are the floor: a site that blocks a classic search crawler at the root has usually decided not to be indexed at all. The full census is here.

The robots.txt lines

You almost certainly do not want to block it. If you must keep it out of one directory:

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /private/

How to verify a request really came from bingbot

Anyone can put the string bingbot in a request. Microsoft publishes the addresses it uses at www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. A request from outside those ranges is an impostor, and impostors using well-known crawler names are common enough that blocking by name alone catches the honest crawler and misses the rest.

Source: Microsoft's crawler documentation. Census: the September 2026 robots.txt census, raw data at /data/census.json.

All 20 crawlers. Check your own robots.txt against all of them with the checker.