Bingbot: the most underrated crawler of the AI era
Bingbot is Microsoft Bing's indexing robot. Long treated as secondary by SEOs, it has become a central GEO player: Bing's index powers Microsoft Copilot, and serves as ChatGPT's web search backbone through the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership. Being well crawled by Bingbot means existing in two of the market's largest AI assistants.
Technical profile
- Operator
- Microsoft
- Role
- Bing indexing (feeds Copilot)
- robots.txt token
Bingbot- User-agent (example)
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- Respects robots.txt
- Yes (documented by Microsoft)
- Official IP ranges
- 28 ranges published by the operator across all its bots (snapshot of 2026-07-23, refreshed on every deployment) — official file
- Official documentation
- Bing crawlers documentation
Why Bingbot outweighs its market share
Bing's classic search market share understates its real influence: when Copilot answers in Windows, Edge or Microsoft 365, and when ChatGPT searches the web, Bing's index does the work. A site poorly indexed by Bing is invisible in those experiences — whatever its Google rankings.
Practical consequence: signing up for Bing Webmaster Tools, submitting your sitemap and maintaining regular Bingbot crawl are GEO investments with returns out of proportion to the effort — most competitors still neglect them.
Bingbot in your logs
Its “bingbot” signature (lowercase in the UA) is easy to track. Lower volume than Googlebot is normal; near-zero volume calls for action: check your Bing Webmaster Tools registration and push your URLs via the tool or IndexNow, the instant notification protocol Bing favors.
Verifying it's really Bingbot
Microsoft publishes Bingbot's official IP ranges in a dedicated JSON file (bingbot.json) and also documents reverse DNS verification (search.msn.com). Our analyzer compares every “bingbot” hit against those ranges automatically, in your browser.
View Bingbot's official IP ranges (JSON)Blocking or allowing Bingbot (robots.txt)
Don't block Bingbot if you want to exist in Bing, Copilot or ChatGPT search: its index serves all three. As with Googlebot, reserve robots.txt for zones without SEO value rather than strategic content.
To block it:
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
To explicitly allow it:
User-agent: Bingbot Allow: /
Frequently asked questions
Why does Bingbot matter for GEO?
Because its index serves far more than Bing.com: Microsoft Copilot relies on it, and ChatGPT uses Bing as its web search backbone through the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership. A site invisible to Bingbot is absent from those assistants, regardless of its Google rankings.
Bingbot barely visits my site — what should I do?
Three documented actions: register with Bing Webmaster Tools (importing from Search Console takes one click), submit your sitemap there, and push new URLs via IndexNow — the instant notification protocol Bing favors. Crawl usually follows within days.
How do I verify a Bingbot hit?
Against the official IP ranges Microsoft publishes in bingbot.json, or by reverse DNS (resolving to search.msn.com). A “bingbot” outside those ranges is an impostor. Our analyzer runs the IP check automatically, without uploading your logs.
Does blocking Bingbot affect ChatGPT?
Yes, indirectly: ChatGPT's web search relies on Bing's index. A site Bingbot cannot crawl sees its presence degraded in the results ChatGPT consults — on top of disappearing from Bing and Copilot.
Sources
Every fact on this page is backed by a primary source — the operator's official documentation and, where it exists, its published IP list.
See what this bot does on your site
Drop your access.log files into the Crawl Lab log analyzer: it isolates Bingbot, verifies its authenticity and lists the pages it requests — entirely in your browser, no upload.
Analyze my logs