Bingbot is the web crawler of Microsoft Bing. It fetches pages so that Bing can index them and show them in its search results.
At a glance
- Operator
- Microsoft (Bing)
- Purpose
- Web crawler for the Bing index
- User agent
- bingbot/2.0 (since April 2022, with Edge version
W.X.Y.Z) - Rendering
- Renders with Microsoft Edge since October 2019
- IP list
- bingbot.json
Last checked:
Rendering and user agent
On October 9, 2019, Bing announced that Bingbot would use Microsoft Edge as its rendering engine and stay evergreen, meaning Bing commits to updating the engine regularly. In April 2022, Bing introduced new user agent strings with bingbot/2.0, in which the Edge version appears as a placeholder W.X.Y.Z. For the desktop crawler it looks like this:
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
Bing said the old user agent would be discontinued by fall 2022. A mobile variant with an Android device string exists as well.
Controlling and verifying Bingbot
Site owners can allow or restrict Bingbot in robots.txt, as with other crawlers. Because a user agent can be faked, Bing publishes the IP ranges of its crawler as a JSON file at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json. A logfile entry can be compared against this list.
Example
A logfile contains requests with bingbot/2.0. If the IP address is not in any range of the list, the request is not verified as Bing. (Invented example.)
Sources
Last updated: