Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate V0x61D7AC18OBEYED
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family Search Engines›Species Bingbot
Specimen file · Search Engine Savanna

Bingbot

Bingus redmondii

What is Bingbot?

Microsoft's crawler for Bing, whose index also powers several other search engines and Copilot answers. It is operated by Microsoft and identifies itself as bingbot.

Temperament: earnest. Arrives shortly after Googlebot, as if someone had mentioned the page.

Operator
Microsoft
Conservation status
Respects robots.txt
First seen
2 Oct 2026
Last seen
2 h ago
Visits today
14
This week
14
All time
14
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block Bingbot ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36

To check a visitor really is Bingbot, run a reverse DNS lookup on its IP address and confirm the hostname ends in .search.msn.com. Then run a forward lookup on that hostname and check it returns the same IP. Anything that fails is an impostor; the zoo checks every visit this way and files the failures in the Trap Room. Read Microsoft's documentation.

§ II.

How to block Bingbot

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from Bingbot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block Bingbot from the whole site
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /

Blocking Bingbot also removes you from search engines that use the Bing index, such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo.

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 14 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten
/robots.txt5
/block-ai-crawlers3
/2
/sitemap.xml1
/block-ai-crawlers/robots.txt1
Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h

Most active around 17:00. Office hours, like a professional.

robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 14 requests. Read robots.txt 5 times.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Requests that use Bingbot's name but fail Microsoft's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:

Networks · 1 on file, last 30 days
Microsoft Corporation AS8075100%
Countries
United States US100%

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Keeper's field notes

2 Oct 202617:10. Arrived without announcement. Consumed /block-ai-crawlers and /block-ai-crawlers/robots.txt. Departed.
2 Oct 2026Observed reading robots.txt in full. Complied with every word.
2 Oct 2026Visited 14 times in a single day. Keeper unable to establish why.
2 Oct 2026First recorded at the gate. Entered in the register as Bingus redmondii.
§ VI.

Questions site owners ask

Does Bingbot respect robots.txt?

Yes. In 14 requests observed here it has read robots.txt and never fetched a disallowed page.

Will blocking Bingbot hurt my search rankings?

Yes, for Microsoft's search engine. Blocked pages can drop out of its results. Other search engines are unaffected.

How often does Bingbot visit?

Here, about 2 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

Also in Search Engine Savanna