What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is Bing’s primary bot, used to crawl websites for indexing in the Bing search engine.
Bingbot is used to gather information about websites for the Bing search index, including the content of the pages, the links on the pages, and the structure of the website.
By continuously crawling the web, Bingbot helps to ensure that the information in the Bing search index is up to date and relevant to users.
In Bing Webmaster Tools it is possible to test pages using Bingbot for crawl errors, get data about Bingbot’s performance on a website, as well as control the speed and timing of Bingbot crawls.
Example user agent string
The following is an example of a Bingbot user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
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 Edg/W.X.Y.Z
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 Edg/W.X.Y.Z (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)New Bingbot User-Agent String (April 2022)
In April 2022 Bing announced in a blogpost that the Bingbot user-agent string would be updated.
Desktop
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
Mobile
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)By regularly updating our web page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge we will be making the above user agent strings evergreen. In the strings above, “W.X.Y.Z” would be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version we’re using, such as “100.0.4896.127″.
How to block Bingbot from crawling
If you want to stop the Bingbot bot from crawling your site, you can set up a disallow rule in your robots.txt file as per the following example:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /