01 · Operator
Who operates Bingbot
02 · Behavior
What Bingbot does
Bingbot crawls pages automatically for the Bing search index, with desktop and mobile user agents. Its rendering engine is regularly updated to the latest stable Microsoft Edge, which is reflected in the Chrome/W.X.Y.Z part of the user agent. It honors robots.txt and the Crawl-delay directive.
03 · Impact
Why Bingbot matters for your site
If you allow it
- Required to appear in Bing search
- Honors robots.txt and Crawl-delay
If you block it
- Only for pages you do not want in Bing (use targeted Disallow rules)
- Spoofed bingbot traffic should be blocked after verification
04 · Allow
How to allow Bingbot
robots.txt
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "bingbot")
Action: Skip › All Super Bot Fight Mode rules
# Also check Security › Bots: "Block AI bots" can block it regardless of robots.txt.WordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /nginx
# nginx serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure no rule like this blocks it:
# if ($http_user_agent ~* "bingbot") { return 403; }Apache
# Apache serves every user agent by default.
# Make sure .htaccess has no rule like this:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bingbot [NC]
# RewriteRule .* - [F,L]05 · Block
How to block Bingbot
Bingbot follows robots.txt, so one rule is enough. Use a server or CDN rule only to stop spoofed copies.
robots.txt
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /Cloudflare
# Security › WAF › Custom rules › Create rule
Expression: (http.user_agent contains "bingbot")
Action: BlockWordPress
# WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt. Edit it with your SEO plugin:
# Yoast: SEO › Tools › File editor · Rank Math: General Settings › Edit robots.txt
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /nginx
# In your server { } block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "bingbot") {
return 403;
}Apache
# .htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bingbot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>06 · User agents
User agents we see for Bingbot
The user agent published by the operator:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.3607 · Verification
Is it really Bingbot?
Anyone can copy a user agent. Real Bingbot requests come from the IP ranges published at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. A reverse DNS lookup of a real request resolves to search.msn.com, and that hostname resolves back to the same IP.
FAQ
Questions about Bingbot
How do I verify Bingbot?
Do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP and check the hostname ends in search.msn.com, then a forward lookup to confirm it resolves to the same IP.
Does Bingbot support Crawl-delay?
Yes. Bing states Bingbot honors the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt.
Can I keep my content out of Bing's AI answers without leaving Bing search?
Bing documents NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE meta tags for this; pages with either tag still appear in Bing search results.
Last reviewed Oct 6, 2026