Kuldeep Paul

AI search index · Microsoft

Bingbot

Bing's crawler. Copilot answers draw on the Bing index and Microsoft has no separate AI token, so Bingbot access decides Copilot visibility.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

2.8%of top sites fully block Bingbot
161sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
17of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
Microsoft
Purpose
AI search index
Used for
Bing, Microsoft Copilot
Obeys robots.txt
Yes
robots.txt token
Bingbot
User-agent string
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/537.36
IP list
www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json
Official docs
bing.com
Feeds
Microsoft Copilot

Block Bingbot in robots.txt

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Blocking a search or user-triggered bot removes your pages from that assistant's answers. To opt out of model training only, block the operator's training crawler instead.

Questions

What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is a ai search index bot operated by Microsoft, used for Bing, Microsoft Copilot. Bing's crawler. Copilot answers draw on the Bing index and Microsoft has no separate AI token, so Bingbot access decides Copilot visibility.

How do I block Bingbot?

Add "User-agent: Bingbot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.

Does Bingbot respect robots.txt?

Yes. Microsoft documents that Bingbot honours robots.txt directives.

How many websites block Bingbot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 2.8% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed Bingbot.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's Bingbot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). Bingbot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "Bingbot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "Bingbot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026bingbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {Bingbot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/bingbot">Bingbot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)