Bingbot
Bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler. It reads pages for Bing's index, which also feeds Microsoft's AI search answers.
Bingbot is the crawler Microsoft uses to find and read web pages for Bing's search index. It visits your site, follows links, fetches pages and reports what it finds, so Bing knows what's on them and when they change.
Even if few of your customers search on Bing, Bingbot is worth caring about. Microsoft's AI search answers are built on Bing's index, so a page Bingbot can't read is a page those answers are unlikely to use.
Why Bingbot matters for AI answers
When Microsoft introduced Copilot Search in Bing, it described answers written from web pages, with links to the sources. Those pages come from what Bing has crawled. So Bingbot is the first step between your page and an answer that cites it.
For example, say Kestrel Roasters adds a new page comparing its subscription plans, but a firewall rule turns away Bingbot. Google indexes the page within days. Bing never sees it, and answers built on Bing keep quoting Kestrel's old prices from a review site instead.
How Bingbot behaves
Bingbot identifies itself with "bingbot" in its user agent, a change Bing announced in 2010. It follows your robots.txt, and a group of rules that names bingbot takes priority over the general * group. Microsoft runs a few other crawlers alongside it, which Bing lists in its help on which crawlers Bing uses.
Anyone can put "bingbot" in their own bot's user agent, so a visit that claims to be Bingbot isn't proof that it is. Bing offers a way to check an address in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bingbot and AnswerOrbit
Copilot is one of the six platforms we ask every day, and when it searches the web we keep the pages it read and the searches it ran. If your pages rarely appear in its sources, check that Bingbot can reach them. You can connect Bing Webmaster Tools in Settings, though Bing doesn't share its Copilot citations report with other tools yet. See How we count.