bingbot
The Bing index, which is what Microsoft Copilot answers from
What bingbot does
bingbot builds the Bing index, and Microsoft Copilot answers from that index. There is no separate Copilot crawler: being crawled by bingbot is the precondition for being cited by Copilot, which makes this the simplest entry in the directory.
It is also, with Googlebot, the least blocked thing we measured. Exactly 1 of 148 sites disallowed bingbot, and that one site disallows every crawler we tested. Effectively nobody blocks it, because blocking it means leaving Bing.
Microsoft's controls for AI answers are therefore not crawler controls. They are the snippet and indexing directives that have existed for years, applied to a surface that is new.
The IP list has not been updated since the start of 2024, which is worth knowing if you are verifying traffic against it rather than assuming it is current.
How to block bingbot
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /What that costs you: Copilot has nothing of yours to answer with, because it answers from Bing.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
Microsoft names the token but does not publish a full user-agent string for it, so match on the token itself.
To find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'bingbot' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really bingbot
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. Microsoft publishes the addresses bingbot fetches from: 28 prefixes when we read the file, last changed on 3 January 2024. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
Terminal
curl -s https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json | python3 -c "
import sys, json, ipaddress
addr = ipaddress.ip_address('203.0.113.10') # the address from your logs
nets = json.load(sys.stdin)['prefixes']
print(any(addr in ipaddress.ip_network(n.get('ipv4Prefix') or n['ipv6Prefix']) for n in nets))
"False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
Should you block bingbot?
No, and hardly anyone does: one site in the whole survey, and that site blocks everything. Blocking bingbot means leaving Bing, and Copilot is downstream of Bing.
Because there is no Copilot-specific crawler there is no Copilot-specific opt-out. The levers Microsoft gives you for AI answers are the ordinary snippet and indexing directives applied to a new surface.
If you verify bingbot traffic against Microsoft's published IP list, note the list has not been updated since January 2024.
Questions
- Does Microsoft Copilot have its own crawler?
- No. Copilot answers from the Bing index, so bingbot's access to your site is what governs eligibility. There is no Copilot token to add to robots.txt.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from Microsoft’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is bingbot allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.