Bingbot
Bing and Copilot together. There is no separate Microsoft AI crawler token, so blocking Bingbot removes you from both at once.
| Operator | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| What it does | Reference |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | Other AI assistants |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
If you want to stay in Bing Search but out of Copilot answers, user-agent rules cannot express that. Microsoft put those controls in meta tags instead, and both preserve normal Bing ranking: NOCACHE limits Copilot to your URL, title and snippet, and NOARCHIVE takes you fully out of Copilot answers and Microsoft generative-AI training.
So the check that matters for Copilot is a meta tag on your pages, not a line in robots.txt — which is why a robots.txt-only tool will tell you nothing useful about it.
As with Googlebot, we never send a Bingbot user agent at your site: Cloudflare's "Fake Bing Bot" rule exists for the same reason Google's does, and tripping it would produce a false positive rather than a finding.
The robots.txt rules
To block Bingbot:
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /If neither rule is present, Bingbot is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn Bingbot away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- Microsoft’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from Microsoft