# Bingbot

Category: [Crawling & Indexing](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/crawling-indexing/) › [Crawlers & bots](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/crawling-indexing/crawlers-bots/)

**Bingbot** is the web crawler of Microsoft Bing. It fetches pages so that Bing can index them and show them in its search results.

## 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:

```txt
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.)

## 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](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json)
- **Docs:** [Bing Webmaster Blog](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2022/4/Announcing-user-agent-change-for-Bing-crawler-bingbot/)

Last checked: October 8, 2026

## Related terms

- [Web crawler](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/web-crawler/index.md)
- [User agent](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/user-agent/index.md)
- [Bing Webmaster Tools](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/bing-webmaster-tools/index.md)
- [robots.txt](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/robots-txt/index.md)
- [Googlebot](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/googlebot/index.md)
- [Bot verification](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/bot-verification/index.md)
- [Fake Googlebot](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/fake-googlebot/index.md)
- [Crawler IP ranges](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/crawler-ip-ranges/index.md)

## Sources

- [The new evergreen Bingbot with Microsoft Edge – Bing Webmaster Blog (Oct 9, 2019)](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2019/the-new-evergreen-bingbot-simplifying-seo-by-leveraging-microsoft-edge)
- [Announcing user-agent change for Bing crawler bingbot – Bing Webmaster Blog (Apr 2022)](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2022/4/Announcing-user-agent-change-for-Bing-crawler-bingbot/)
- [Bingbot IP addresses (bingbot.json) – Bing](https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json)
- [Bingbot – SEOBility Wiki (secondary)](https://www.seobility.net/en/wiki/Bingbot)

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Last updated: October 8, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/bingbot/